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Got past the purple screen of death using the nomodeset header at GRUB.

However, when I check if the rx550 is being used with lshw | grep AMD, only the processor and some micro devices get listed.

Since I use LXDE and I needed to get final confirmation that I don't have the right drivers, I logged out and then in with the GNOME desktop environment and clicked on Settings > About, then it turned out that my Ubuntu installation was using the APU instead of my GPU.

Reading up on the issue from forum posts and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver tells me that the rx550 is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (and so does the official AMD drivers page for Linux https://support.amd.com/en-us/download/linux).

Since the new amdgpu-pro drivers were released a couple of months back, I was wondering if there are any updates on whether there's a way to get 17.10 to work with the rx550?

I've read up on all materials that I can find, and I am on Stack Overflow basically every day because of my work (WebDev, with very limited SysAdmin experience), so I decided to ask here.

fatalVoltage
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The AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), formerly known as Fusion, is the marketing term for a series of 64-bit microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), designed to act as a central processing unit (CPU) and graphics accelerator unit (GPU) on a single die.

There's often a setting in the BIOS that needs to be changed to flip between on chip graphics and a discrete graphics card.

sudo lshw -C display | grep "driver" is what you want to determine what driver the chip is using.

Research indicates that The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver does work fine with the Radeon RX 550, although it's true that it "Provides support for Ubuntu® 16.04.3 (kernel 4.10/X.Org 1.19)"

The latest binary blob release from AMD of the amdgpu-pro drivers is currently version 17.50 which delivers amdgpu-pro and amdgpu-all-open stacks using the same packaging infrastructure.

Further complicating matters it doesn't appear that any of the binary blobs from AMD support Wayland at the moment so if you intend to try to use one you will likely find it necessary to switch-from-wayland-back-to-xorg.

You might consider using the open source amdgpu packages available in the repositories for artful as a viable alternative.

For further detail on open source AMD APU/GPU drivers see this.

Elder Geek
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  • Thank you for shedding some light, I did indeed try installing the amdgpu-pro drivers the other day (17.10 comes with amdgpu by default, and running the command you advised me to use above confirms that configuration: driver=amdgpu latency=0), but amdgpu-pro didn't work with my kernel, since 17.10 has 4.13 and 16.04has 4.4 (and amdgpu-pro officially only supports 16.04 and its kernel.)

    Might try switching back to xorg though, will have to read up first, but intend to write an update here in case someone has the same issues.

     – fatalVoltage Mar 04 '18 at 10:22
  • @fatalVoltage You are welcome. Please keep us posted. Thank you! – Elder Geek Mar 04 '18 at 19:09