NetBSD amdgpu testing in 2026

shep

My paranoia pushed me to build an AM5/DDR5 based system a little over a year ago. In retrospect, a good move as the same system would now cost 3x to build.

My old AM4/DDR4 is sitting in the closet - I thought it would be interesting to test the amdgpu driver and followed this guide

With 11.0-stable (11Oct2026), It ended up crashing on one of the boot.cfg modules.

Would it be better to try 11.99 and does anyone know if the native xorg in 11.99 has amdgpu enabled?

nia

The guide is wrong and modular xorg is not required. Replacing xbase will give you further problems.

Check out NetBSD from source and build a kernel with amdgpu enabled:

$ cvs -q -danoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot co -P src
$ cd src
$ cp sys/arch/amd64/conf/GENERIC sys/arch/amd64/conf/AMDGPU
$ vi sys/arch/amd64/conf/AMDGPU (... find amdgpu and uncomment it)
$ ./build.sh -U -j2 -m amd64 tools kernel=AMDGPU
# mv /netbsd /onetbsd
# cp [path-to-built-file]/netbsd /netbsd

Configure xorg to use the modesetting driver. See /usr/X11R7/share/examples/xorg/xorg.conf.

Also, I have started a wiki page that lists discrete GPUs that are known to work: https://wiki.netbsd.org/gpus/

shep

nia
Thanks - great concise guide.
My system has an Ryzen 5 4600G cpu/gpu and the install was 11.0 stable from 11Oct.
Unfortunately the AMDGPU kernel generates a fatal error during GPU init.

nia

shep Can you please file a problem report?

https://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/sendpr.cgi?gndb=netbsd

A photograph of the panic message should suffice, if it doesn't boot into a usable system.

shep

rvp

shep This is just the kernel panicing because it can't get a usable console. What's needed are the messages from the amdgpu driver before that amdgpu0: error: Fatal error during CPU init message.

To get this, you can,

reboot at the debugger prompt;
in the bootloader, userconf disable amdgpu* (so that the kernel falls back to genfb for the console);
collect dmesg output after login.
The kernel messages from the last boot will still be preserved.

It would be more helpful if you could get verbose messages with boot -vx when booting with amdgpu (don't pass them the 2nd time around--it'll just push more of the old messages out).