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Migration to AMD on Arch
heliophane Nov 5, 2023
Howdy all! I'm new, and excited to be here!

I wanted to start by asking a question. I have an Nvidia GPU at the moment(1060) and will finally be upgrading this week to either an RX 7600 or 7700. What do I need to do on my system to get ready? Remove the Nvidia package and install mesa? How do I handle getting rid of the 32 bit Nvidia dependencies for steam on Arch and replacing them with the open source ones? Would be easier to just reinstall? I've been on this installation for about a month and have everything in a manner I like, but could just use stow to backup my dotfiles and move them to the new install if needed.


Sorry if I rambled on too much. TL;DR I'm migrating from an Nvidia GPU to an AMD GPU this week and don;t know how to deal with driver replacement on Arch.
Grogan Nov 5, 2023
It should be pretty easy. Technically you shouldn't have to do anything, but you'll want to remove the nvidia packages. You probably already have Mesa installed as a dependency for other things. Perhaps not all of the parts you need (Arch splits the mesa packages)

I would remove your Nvidia packages after installing the new AMD card.

You will probably need to install vulkan-radeon

This is mesa on Arch (their distro packages)

libva-mesa-driver, mesa, mesa-vdpau, opencl-clover-mesa, opencl-rusticl-mesa, vulkan-intel, vulkan-mesa-layers, vulkan-radeon, vulkan-swrast, vulkan-virtio

This is lib32 mesa:

lib32-libva-mesa-driver, lib32-mesa, lib32-mesa-vdpau, lib32-opencl-clover-mesa, lib32-opencl-rusticl-mesa, lib32-vulkan-intel, lib32-vulkan-mesa-layers, lib32-vulkan-radeon, lib32-vulkan-swrast, lib32-vulkan-virtio

You certainly don't have to start over :-)

P.S. You might need to remove Nvidia's xorg.conf file IF you have generated one (e.g. with nvida-xconfig)

For AMD, you probably don't want/need one at all. Rename it if present.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Last edited by Grogan on 5 November 2023 at 5:33 pm UTC
heliophane Nov 5, 2023
Quoting: GroganIt should be pretty easy. Technically you shouldn't have to do anything, but you'll want to remove the nvidia packages. You probably already have Mesa installed as a dependency for other things. Perhaps not all of the parts you need (Arch splits the mesa packages)

I would remove your Nvidia packages after installing the new AMD card.

You will probably need to install vulkan-radeon

This is mesa on Arch (their distro packages)

libva-mesa-driver, mesa, mesa-vdpau, opencl-clover-mesa, opencl-rusticl-mesa, vulkan-intel, vulkan-mesa-layers, vulkan-radeon, vulkan-swrast, vulkan-virtio

This is lib32 mesa:

lib32-libva-mesa-driver, lib32-mesa, lib32-mesa-vdpau, lib32-opencl-clover-mesa, lib32-opencl-rusticl-mesa, lib32-vulkan-intel, lib32-vulkan-mesa-layers, lib32-vulkan-radeon, lib32-vulkan-swrast, lib32-vulkan-virtio

You certainly don't have to start over :-)

P.S. You might need to remove Nvidia's xorg.conf file IF you have generated one (e.g. with nvida-xconfig)

For AMD, you probably don't want/need one at all. Rename it if present.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Amazing, thank you! :D

I'm genuinely so excited for this, a majority of my issues with linux since I started my journey in 2018 have been related to me having an Nvidia card. I can't wait to get on wayland! fully supported too!
Grogan Nov 5, 2023
By the way, a nice thing about Arch is that they have wikis for everything:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU

You might catch a tidbit or two if you skim those (maybe read the Nvidia one backwards )
Grogan Nov 6, 2023
Oh, something I forgot to mention. You may have heard about how awful it is to switch away from the proprietary Nvidia driver. There was a time when you may have had to reinstall some Xorg and Mesa packages, but it's not like that anymore. (i.e. don't get hung up on old info still floating around)

That's because we use dispatchers for the hardware specific components of OpenGL and Vulkan. We use libglvnd (GL vendor neutral dispatch) which was specifically implemented for the Nvidia case, because that used to break Mesa.

Vulkan uses the vulkan-icd-loader to dispatch "installable client drivers" for your vulkan implementation.

Last edited by Grogan on 6 November 2023 at 3:04 am UTC
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