Tails

#6 Updated by Whitry 2016-09-30 18:24:10

Thanks! I have tested the ISO and the issue is fixed there, graphics are smooth on my R9 390.

From the GPU families you mentioned only Hawaii is affected. Hawaii is R9 290/290X. The rest of the affected GPUs are all different types.

#9 Updated by Whitry 2016-10-15 23:17:31

Thanks! I hope this question isn’t stupid, but if this is already fixed, why will people who own one of those GPUs have to wait until 2.8 is released to be able to use Tails again, so why can’t this fix be added to 2.7?

#10 Updated by BitingBird 2016-10-16 04:42:36

Whitry: 2.7 will be a minor release, 2.8 will be a major release. We don’t introduce new features in minor release, we mostly re-build with updated software from uptream.

#11 Updated by intrigeri 2016-10-16 15:37:15

> Whitry: 2.7 will be a minor release, 2.8 will be a major release. We don’t introduce new features in minor release, we mostly re-build with updated software from uptream.

Exactly. In particular, we generally avoid pushing changes that may break hardware support in minor releases, since they have no release candidate for people to test.

#13 Updated by Baum 2016-12-20 02:16:35

Why is this not fixed in 4.9? This bug is making Tails unusable for a relatively huge percentage of all users and you just keep pushing the fix further away? This would deserve to get fixed in a hotfix immediately, how can you just wait so long and dont even communicate here why its not part of the current release?

This bug is in Tails since 2.4. Since 2.4 many AMD users cant use Tails any more and you treat this bug like its some minor thing!

#14 Updated by intrigeri 2016-12-20 09:39:30

> Why is this not fixed in 4.9? This bug is making Tails unusable for a relatively huge percentage of all users and you just keep pushing the fix further away? This would deserve to get fixed in a hotfix immediately, how can you just wait so long and dont even communicate here why its not part of the current release?

> This bug is in Tails since 2.4. Since 2.4 many AMD users cant use Tails any more and you treat this bug like its some minor thing!

The fix for this bug has a quite big risk for introducing regressions for basically everybody else, so we didn’t want to introduce it in a bugfix-only release, that has no release candidate, and thus won’t see much testing before being released.

#16 Updated by Wurd 2017-01-28 01:46:51

Unfortunately, this is not fixed in 4.10. It is still only doing software rendering on those AMD GPUs.

Support for these GPUs only got worse, because now multi monitor setups dont work any more. Out of my 3 monitors, only 2 work, the other one is black and does not show anything. And the 2 that work actually show the same image, so Tails does not recognize it as 2 different screens, it just mirrors it. If I disconnect the 2 monitors that work and only connect the one that was black before then that one works (but still only software rendering, so everything lags).
In 4.9 that still worked and I got 3 monitors with every monitor being an individual part of the desktop.

Why is GPU support only getting worse in Tails over time? In 4.3 everything worked great, with 4.4 GPU rendering stopped working and with 4.10 now only 1 monitor works :(

#17 Updated by intrigeri 2017-01-28 07:47:52

> Unfortunately, this is not fixed in 4.10. It is still only doing software rendering on those AMD GPUs.

Please report a bug about this, so that we get all the info we need (system logs, hardware details) to try and address it.

Note that at least one user reported (Bug #11850#note-6) that the changes this ticket is about did fix problems on a R9 390, so perhaps not all of those AMD graphics adapters have got worse. Also, in the future you may want to consider testing release candidates (in this case: Tails 2.10~rc1) so that such problems are identified before the actual, final release :)

#18 Updated by Wurd 2017-01-29 21:04:15

Am am the same user like Whitry, I just created a new account because I forgot my password (when I havent visited a site for 4 months, that usually happens…).

I did test that ISO 4 months ago, and that ISO back then fixed the issue, but it seems like the fix is not in 4.10, because 4.10 behaves same like 2.4 - 2.9. So something went wrong between having the fix in the ISO and having it in 4.10.

And yes, I should have tested the RC, but I thought there would be some QA that makes sure this is fixed when its marked as fixed, since it worked fine 4 months ago in that experimental ISO.

#19 Updated by Kaffka 2017-02-08 19:14:10

Please reopen, this is still present in Tails 2.10 with Radeon R9 390 (Fury).

dmesg:

[    1.935764] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[    1.939708] [drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled.
[    1.951220] fb: switching to radeondrmfb from EFI VGA
[    1.951573] [drm] initializing kernel modesetting (HAWAII 0x1002:0x67B1 0x174B:0xE324 0x80).
[    1.951579] [drm] register mmio base: 0xDFE00000
[    1.951580] [drm] register mmio size: 262144
[    1.951582] [drm] doorbell mmio base: 0xD0000000
[    1.951582] [drm] doorbell mmio size: 8388608
[    1.951607] radeon 0000:01:00.0: Invalid PCI ROM header signature: expecting 0xaa55, got 0xffff
[    1.951705] radeon 0000:01:00.0: VRAM: 8192M 0x0000000000000000 - 0x00000001FFFFFFFF (8192M used)
[    1.951706] radeon 0000:01:00.0: GTT: 2048M 0x0000000200000000 - 0x000000027FFFFFFF
[    1.951706] [drm] Detected VRAM RAM=8192M, BAR=256M
[    1.951707] [drm] RAM width 512bits DDR
[    1.951775] [drm] radeon: 8192M of VRAM memory ready
[    1.951776] [drm] radeon: 2048M of GTT memory ready.
[    1.951783] [drm] Loading hawaii Microcode
[    1.951793] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/hawaii_pfp.bin
[    1.951800] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/hawaii_me.bin
[    1.951807] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/hawaii_ce.bin
[    1.951815] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/hawaii_mec.bin
[    1.951821] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/hawaii_rlc.bin
[    1.951827] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/hawaii_sdma.bin
[    1.951837] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/hawaii_mc.bin
[    1.951842] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load radeon/hawaii_k_smc.bin (-2)
[    1.951845] radeon 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for radeon/hawaii_k_smc.bin failed with error -2
[    1.951866] radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/HAWAII_smc.bin
[    1.951897] [drm:cik_init [radeon]] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!
[    1.951898] radeon 0000:01:00.0: Fatal error during GPU init
[    1.951900] [drm] radeon: finishing device.
[    1.959170] [drm] radeon: ttm finalized
[    1.959346] radeon: probe of 0000:01:00.0 failed with error -22

#20 Updated by Kaffka 2017-02-08 19:16:53

Full log attached.

#21 Updated by Kaffka 2017-02-08 19:35:58

Sorry if I’m spaming, adding info as I go. :)

Seems like hawaii_k_smc.bin is missing:

amnesia@amnesia:~$ ls -al /lib/firmware/radeon | grep hawaii_
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   8832 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_ce.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  32796 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_mc.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   8832 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_me.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  17024 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_mec.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   8832 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_pfp.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   8448 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_rlc.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   4456 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_sdma1.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   4456 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_sdma.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 130796 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_smc.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 232752 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_uvd.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 101072 Oct  1 22:38 hawaii_vce.bin

Might be related to:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=843061
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=838858

#23 Updated by intrigeri 2017-02-09 13:48:48

I’ll work on it on Bug #12218, because repurposing this ticket is confusing. Expect test ISO images later this week.

#24 Updated by intrigeri 2017-02-09 13:50:38

Also, note that if one single affected user had tested 2.10~rc1, we would have had a chance to avoid releasing with that regression :)