Howdy all. I got my first framework laptop (16) with the graphics card expansion slot. I’ve installed Mint, under the guidance that it should be mostly supported given Mint’s relationship to Ubuntu. I purchased the DIY configuration, and installed everything per the instruction guide (at least, I think I have). When I check the BIOS version via command line, it reports 3.03 and has secure boot enabled since I also installed the multimedia codecs.
What I’m seeing, though, is that the Radeon RX7700S doesn’t seem to get detected as in use. “lspci” shows an AMD device attached to VGA, but I can’t find any tools which indicate it’s actually being used. When I install Steam and run a game, the system utilization on the processor jumps into the 70s (certainly the fans kick into high gear). Even cinnamon occasionally starts hogging the CPU at 50% processing, and the entire system becomes slow to respond. Has anyone encountered this issue in the recent batches?
If anyone has diagnostic suggestions, I’m comfortable in Linux environments, but I’ll need guidance on specific commands to run / programs to install.
Some Vulkan applications will detect both GPUs and let you choose which one to use in the game. For games that don’t you can add DRI_PRIME=1 to the launch environment for the game and it will run on the dGPU.
I’ve found the problem. In case anyone else stumbles on this in future…
At time of writing, install media for Linux Mint installs with Linux Kernel 5.15. This kernel is on long term support and does not have the drivers necessary for the Framework 16’s Radeon RX 7700S. In addition to the normal updates after an install, you will have to manually instruct the system to update the kernel to one with the drivers. I just took latest and didn’t diff hunt to find a minimum kernel version. From here, the DRI_PRIME=1 launch argument will be usable in steam.
The troubleshooting guidance for this is buried in the Linux Mint forums here. From a clean install, their instructions for checking if the drivers are loaded on the GPU will show that none are.
Good to know and not surprising. My laptop I have Linux Mint on now is on kernel 6.9.3 as of today. I gave up on the LTS kernel due to too many other bugs even on a 2 year old System76 system. Waiting for the RAM I ordered separate from my FW16 DIY edition to get it set up.
Even with Mint Edge, still keep in mind, just because Mint is based on Ubuntu does not mean everything will just work, like expected with officially supported distros.
Understood about the official support rules. I was getting close to switching to Ubuntu when I found the post on the Mint forums, for that reason. That said, are there any public deep dive docs that might help indicate what’s in the two officially supported distros that actually makes the laptop tick? I’d love to understand the hardware better.