MESA using LLVMPIPE instead of the Graphics Hardware

[isaac0clarke (Isaac Clarke)]

Long story short I have a PC with an old, but still undeniably modern and powerful CPU with integrated graphics.

Because of an error on the MESA Devs’ side the Kaveri graphics (at least iGPU ones) are getting their support dropped.

Desktop stuff works decently (at the beginning of Mesa25 even fullscreen videos like with VLC did this), but games have this glitch.

Here’s the latest post I made about this issue.

How do I change the default AMD "driver"?

Long story short: The Kaveri graphics are having issues again with Mesa drivers, and here I got told this: Oh it looks like you are using the radeon kernel driver so you aren’t even using radv, only llvmpipe software rendering for vulkan. GCN 1.x and 2.x gpus can use either the radeon or amdgpu driver, radeon is what is used by default though that limits you to opengl only. It is what is used by default by the kernel and most distros due to the amdgpu driver lacking support for some output/v…

I NEEDED to make a new post to get an answer for the old one because anything older than 20 hours (which is not cared about by enough people) falls into the Memory Hole.

.

Inb4 anyone asks “why can’t you just google” or “just spam the Devs”:

1. I have already “just google’d”, ONLY other forum posts asking for help WITH NO RESULTS came up.
2. Spamming the Devs will just get me banned, and it’s asshole behavior.

---

Regressing the Mesa drivers to the latest Mesa 24 release MAY just solve this, but I don’t want to do that for obvious reasons (which I STILL have to preventively list):

1. Newer Fedora KDE releases may need something from newer Mesa releases.
2. BY PRINCIPLE they should still just work.

[theprogram (MatH)]

You should read over the posts Joe put on your previous thread. It is unclear if you have tried that.

Joe is a real professional, you can trust him.

[isaac0clarke (Isaac Clarke)]

Honest and dr answer:

It’s very hot where I live so I missread the previous post, going off an assumption.
It’s been a while since last time I worked on that PC because I have been busy.

Now too it’s too hot for me to “digest” what is said here:

How do I change the default AMD "driver"?

The original instructions provided were to modify the kernel arguments for immutable variants/atomic desktops What I provided was how to modify the kernel arguments for grub2 with grubby on a non-atomic installation. ref: Working with the GRUB 2 Boot Loader :: Fedora Docs If you wanted to limit the change to only one kernel you could change the --update-kernel argument to be the path of the kernel you’d like to update. i.e. --update-kernel=/boot/vmlinuz-6.14.8-300.fc42.x86_64 you…

Long story short:
Since I don’t care about “the deep lore” of Linux incantations, ESPECIALLY NOW that it’s almost 30 italian degrees where I live, can I just get a set of instructions which are SURE to work and a short description about what they do?

[leorize]

Assuming that you’re using a Kaveri-based APU, this is what you need to run to switch from radeon driver to amdgpu:

sudo grubby --args=radeon.cik_support=0 --args=amdgpu.cik_support=1 --update-kernel=ALL

Then reboot.

What this does is update your bootloader (GRUB) to pass radeon.cik_support=0 and amdgpu.cik_support=1 to the Kernel, which tells radeon driver to not initialize and let amdgpu take over for your hardware.

I don’t know why the default is not to use amdgpu for these old hardware, but there might be issues when you switch over. If you want to undo the changes, run:

sudo grubby --remove-args=radeon.cik_support=0 --remove-args=amdgpu.cik_support=1 --update-kernel=ALL

If you could not boot (i.e. black screen), you can edit the kernel command line at GRUB screen by pressing e and manually remove the two added parameters, then press Ctrl-X to boot. Afterwards run the above command to clear them out permanently.

---

With that said, if this issue was caused by an upgrade (and ideally you verified it), please file a bug so the problem can be fixed by Fedora maintainers.

[isaac0clarke (Isaac Clarke)]

Thank you for the advice.

I’ll apply it as soon as the other PC becomes available once again.

---

In regards of the “bug report” I’ve already filed a couple, but to MESA themselves, as I got told that “this issue is with them, not the Fedora teams”.

Mesa 25 not working on Kaveri architecture, fallback to Software Rendering....

Kaveri graphics no longer supported after Mesa 25.02 (#13192) · Issues · Mesa...

.

The issue was partially fixed in Mesa 25.0.x (something), but then it just came right back again.
I made this post here because, other that the quote down here, the second MESA report ended up having no further communications on it, so I didn’t get the answer I sought, which you may have just brought me.

@isaac0clarke

I NEEDED to make a new post to get an answer for the old one because anything older than 20 hours (which is not cared about by enough people) falls into the Memory Hole.

[isaac0clarke (Isaac Clarke)]

It doesn’t work.

I also tried inverting the 1 and 0 and that too did nothing.

To be safe I also ran the second command once done, both ways.

---

Man, what an odyssey…

If an answer can’t be found here I’ll be forced to make a third MESA bug report…

[leorize]

@isaac0clarke

I also tried inverting the 1 and 0 and that too did nothing.

Please don’t invert them.

Anyhow, with the parameters added, can you post the output of sudo journalctl -b 0 -k?

In case the output is too long, you can redirect it into a file then upload it to pastebin using: sudo journalctl -b 0 -k | fpaste, then send the link here.

I’d like to have the output of fpaste --sysinfo --printonly as well.

[isaac0clarke (Isaac Clarke)]

It’ll be some time before I can get to work on that PC again.

In the meantime please click on the second MESA link in Message_5; there already are a lot of files on there which shouldn’t have changed at all since when I uploaded them.