Hello Tim,

First you need to know the chipset name of your card in order to know
it's family. To do that you need to run (or similar):

```
lspci | grep VGA
```

It's output on my desktop shows:

```
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
[AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480] (rev ef)
```

This tells me that the chipset name of my card is Ellesmere, which is
the POLARIS architecture. A quick look to [RadeonFeature][1] tells me
that POLARIS is part of the [Volcanic Islands family][2]. The [gentoo
wiki][3] might help too. Knowing the family is important, as it tells
you how to tell the kernel to load the amdgpu driver before radeon.

Because I suspect FirePro W4100 to be quite old, the [archlinux
howtos][4] might be helpful to you.

That being said, you might prefer installing the [proprietary
drivers][5] if you plan to use a professional card. I suspect taking
that road would come with its own set of problems.

I hope this helps,
Ludovic

[1]: https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/
[2]:
https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#decoderringforengineeringvsmarketingnames
[3]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU#Feature_support
[4]:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMDGPU#Enable_Southern_Islands_.28SI.29_and_Sea_Islands_.28CIK.29_support
[5]:
https://www.amd.com/en/support/professional-graphics/firepro/firepro-wx100-series/firepro-w4100

On 29/01/20 23:05, Tim Wallace via Dng wrote:
> I have been happily running ascii but upgraded from my Intel built-in
> graphics to an AMD FirePro W4100 because I do a lot of 4K video editing,
> but no game-playing, and thought this 50W card would save energy and
> work well with 4K.  There is a nearly identical Nvidia card, but I
> decided to support AMD, for easier Linux support, which has not been my
> experience!
>
> The card booted OK under ascii but was using the Radeon Xorg driver
> which gave flashing behavior from time to time, typical of a bad video
> driver.  I decided to try beowulf to get some newer versions of stuff.
>
> I installed a generic ascii on my other partition, then did the upgrade,
> from an xterm, perhaps not the smartest idea but it worked.  When I ran
> synaptic, it added and removed hundreds of packages!  Not exactly
> efficient, but I was left with a working system.  The only issue was
> that my Samsung M.2 SSD only boots as efi, and install systems don't
> seem to realize that, resulting in boot failure or boot install failure,
> but I used the rEFInd program to recover everything, and all seems good
> with both beowulf and ascii.
>
> The situation now is that I can't get the correct X video driver
> working, which should be the amdgpu one, under either ascii or beowulf.
> (Full screen 4K video plays great at 60 fps under mpv, with nothing
> dropped and no flashes.)  I did try disabling pretty much all the
> acceleration options on the radeon driver, but that did not help with
> the flashing.
>
> Details:
> Motherboard ASRock Z97 Extreme6, i7-4790K, 16 GB, latest Bios 2.80
>
> added non-free repository, and installed firmware.  On boot, both radeon
> and amdgpu kernel modules are installed.  When X starts, the radeon
> driver is used.  The xorg.conf output by Xorg -configure calls for the
> amdgpu driver, but trying to run, get fatal error:
>
> amdgpu_device_initialize: DRM version is 2.50.0 but this kernel is only
> compatible with 3.x.x
>
>
> Under ascii, the radeon driver is called for by Xorg -configure, and the
> error when forcing amdgpu is almost the same, except
>
>    ... DRM version is 2.49.0...
>
> It seems that there are some incompatibilities built into both ascii and
> beowulf when it comes to this card.  I could compile a kernel (which I
> used to do all the time in the 90's, and probably haven't done for 10
> years) if that would help with the DRM version issue.
>
> I tried the Ubuntu version of the proprietary driver from AMD, and it
> complained about the kernel version.  I could compile a kernel to match
> the Ubuntu one, I suppose, and re-try the proprietary driver, if anyone
> thinks that would help.  I'm not looking for the fastest performance in
> the world, though, just stability!
>
> Any advice?
>
> --Tim
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dng mailing list
> Dng@???
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
>