Tag: Debian

There are three things that need to be updated in Debian Stretch in order to get the Radeon RX 550 running properly (or at all): kernel, Mesa, and proprietary binary firmware (bummer, I know).

First, make sure you have stretch-backports in your apt sources with all the relevant components.

$ deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main contrib non-free

Now, the kernel that currently comes with Stretch (4.9.0-8) is missing some important configurations: CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU_SI and CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU_CIK. So you will need to install the latest one from the backports, which does have the correct configuration.

$ sudo apt install -t stretch-backports linux-image-amd64

Next is getting the proper firmware.

$ sudo apt install -t stretch-backports firmware-linux-nonfree

This will also update the firmware-amd-graphics, which provides the binary blobs that are needed by the amdgpu driver to work properly. The old version does not support the new Polaris 12 architecture used by the RX 550, while the version from the backports (20180825) does support Polaris 12.

Now comes the part of upgrading Mesa. There are a bunch of binary packages that are derived from the Mesa source package, and we need to upgrade each one of them to version 18 (or later, but 18 is what is provided by the backports). The following two commands will upgrade any Mesa-related package already installed and then re-mark them as automatically installed (just to keep things tidy as they were).

sudo apt install -t stretch-backports $(grep-status -S mesa -a -FStatus "install ok installed" -s Package -n | sort -u)
sudo apt-mark auto $(grep-status -S mesa -a -FStatus "install ok installed" -s Package -n | sort -u)

(credit for the last two lines). Now you can restart your computer, and the RX 550 should work. You can test it using

$ DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep OpenGL
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon 500 Series (POLARIS12, DRM 3.26.0, 4.18.0-0.bpo.1-amd64, LLVM 6.0.0)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 18.1.6

The DRI_PRIME=1 is necessary; otherwise, glxinfo would use the integrated card.

This is not necessary, but if lspci does not properly display the RX 550, you will need to update the PCI IDs that are used to translate IDs to actual human-readable names.

$ sudo update-pciids

Final word: if you are using TLP for power management, it may not play nice with the RX 550. With TLP enabled, I get pretty horrible performance out of it (regardless of whether it’s on AC or battery).

This tutorial walks you through patching an existing Debian package. It is useful if you want to create a .deb of a package after fixing some bug or modifying the source in any other way. We will use hugin as our example.

We start by fetching the source package.

$ apt-get source hugin
$ cd hugin-2017.0.0+dfsg

We will need a tool named quilt to make the process easier.

# apt install quilt

Before using quilt, we want to make it aware of the debian/patches directory, which holds the patches. Adding the following lines to ~/.quiltrc will make quilt search up the directory tree for the debian/patches directory.

d=. ; while [ ! -d $d/debian -a `readlink -e $d` != / ]; do d=$d/..; done
if [ -d $d/debian ] && [ -z $QUILT_PATCHES ]; then
        # if in Debian packaging tree with unset $QUILT_PATCHES
        QUILT_PATCHES="debian/patches"
        QUILT_PATCH_OPTS="--reject-format=unified"
        QUILT_DIFF_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index --color=auto"
        QUILT_REFRESH_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index"
        QUILT_COLORS="diff_hdr=1;32:diff_add=1;34:diff_rem=1;31:diff_hunk=1;33:diff_ctx=35:diff_cctx=33"
        if ! [ -d $d/debian/patches ]; then mkdir $d/debian/patches; fi
fi

Now the actual patching process starts. The patches are applied in series, and our new patch should be the last one. We start by applying any existing patches and then creating a new patch.

$ quilt push -a
$ quilt new 44_setlocale.patch

I chose the 44_ prefix because hugin already has a patch named 43_fallbackhelp.patch, and the convention is to name patches so the names reflect the order in which they are applied. Next, we specify to quilt which files we modify, and then we edit them.

$ quilt add src/hugin1/hugin/huginApp.cpp
$ vim src/hugin1/hugin/huginApp.cpp

Alternatively, instead of editing the files manually, quilt import can be used to import an existing patch.

Each patch comes with its own metadata to let other people know who wrote it and what it does. Use

$ quilt header --dep3 -e

to edit this metadata. For example:

Description: Call setlocale()
This fixes a bug in wxExecute, see https://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/16206
The patch has been submitted to upstream, https://groups.google.com/d/msg/hugin-ptx/FCi7ykPDZ5E/3w8E5U1SCQAJ
Author: Guy Rutenberg <guyrutenberg@gmail.com>
Last-Update: 2017-10-04
---
This patch header follows DEP-3: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/
See [DEP-3](http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/) for more details about the different fields.

After we finish editing, we finalize the patch and unapply all the patches.

$ quilt refresh
$ quilt pop -a

Now, you can continue to build the deb from source as usual. We use debchange to create a new version and debuild to build the package. After the package is built, it can be installed using debi.

$ DEBEMAIL="Guy Rutenberg <guyrutenberg@gmail.com>" debchange --nmu
$ debuild -us -uc -i -I -j7

Sources:

• UsingQuilt