Trying to get amdvlk to load for installation and operation of X-Plane 12

English Hardware
1

I’m trying to get X-Plane 12 to install. It requires the Vulcan driver, which I installed (vulkan-amdgpu) from AMD website, but is not loading. I should add that my amdgpu driver is installed from the same version and website. dmesg shows:

**
RYZEN9:/home/ronnie #** lsmod | grep amd 
edac_mce_**amd**           36864  0 
kvm_**amd**               147456  0 
kvm                  1040384  1 kvm_**amd**
**amd**gpu               7827456  40 
drm_ttm_helper         16384  1 **amd**gpu 
ttm                    81920  2 **amd**gpu,drm_ttm_helper 
mfd_core               20480  1 **amd**gpu 
iommu_v2               24576  1 **amd**gpu 
gpu_sched              49152  1 **amd**gpu 
i2c_algo_bit           16384  2 igb,**amd**gpu 
drm_kms_helper        303104  1 **amd**gpu 
drm                   630784  21 gpu_sched,drm_kms_helper,**amd**gpu,drm_ttm_helper,ttm 
ccp                   106496  1 kvm_**amd**

X-Plane installer gives me this:


0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK:     AMD Radeon (TM) RX 480 Graphics reported: Your graphics drivers cannot support Vulkan X-Plane. X-Plane requires the Mesa RADV driver for AMD hardware
0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK: Picked bridge device: AMD Radeon (TM) RX 480 Graphics (polaris10, LLVM 14.0.1, DRM 3.42, 5.14.21-150400.24.21-default)
0:00:00.000 E/GFX: Failed to initialize Vulkan
0:00:00.000 E/GFX: Vulkan layer reported: Your graphics drivers cannot support Vulkan X-Plane. X-Plane requires the Mesa RADV driver for AMD hardware
0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: X-Plane failed to initialize Vulkan and can't run.

If I modprobe amdvlk64, I am given a module not found error. The file amdvlk64.so does reside within the /opt/amdgpu/lib64 directory, but not within my kernel’s module directory.
The X-Plane installer log states that Mesa RADV is required, but I find no mesa-radv packages available. I am at a loss.
The installer is a 40MB download if anyone wishes to do any verification. The installer will not open at all on my machine because of the Vulkan error. Link is: https://www.x-plane.com/desktop/try-it/

2

You did not tell from where exactly you downloaded which driver…
If you are using this driver, there are many hints that you need some kernel flags and additional some infos under known issues…

Note: To run the Vulkan driver with AMDGPU upstream driver stack on SI and CI generation GPUs, amdgpu.si_support and amdgpu.cik_support need to be enabled in kernel

  • The driver can only work with firmware of ME feature version >= 25 (you can check the version with command “sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_firmware_info”). If you are using upstream stack with GPUs of SI or CI family, you may need to upgrade the kernel to 4.19 or later version and firmware (under /lib/firmware/amdgpu/) to the right version from amdgpu - kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git - Repository of firmware blobs for use with the Linux kernel, and then update ramfs (sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-uname -r uname -r)
3

Hi
I’m on MicroOS on a AMD Laptop, no driver install required to activate vulkan, AFAIK it shouldn’t be needed in Leap 15.4 either? Perhaps Mesa package not installed…


zypper se -i vulkan


S  | Name                      | Summary                                                | Type
---+---------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------+--------
i  | libgstvulkan-1_0-0        | GStreamer Streaming-Media Framework Plug-Ins           | package
i  | libvulkan1                | The Vulkan 3D graphics and compute API                 | package
i+ | libvulkan_radeon          | Mesa vulkan driver for AMD GPU                         | package
i+ | Mesa-vulkan-device-select | Vulkan layer to select Vulkan devices provided by Mesa | package
i+ | vulkan-tools              | Diagnostic utilities for Vulkan                        | package

vulkaninfo

......

Layers: count = 1
=================
VK_LAYER_MESA_device_select (Linux device selection layer) Vulkan version 1.3.211, layer version 1:
    Layer Extensions: count = 0
    Devices: count = 2
        GPU id = 0 (AMD Unknown (RADV CARRIZO))
        Layer-Device Extensions: count = 0


        GPU id = 1 (AMD Radeon R7 M340 (RADV ICELAND))
        Layer-Device Extensions: count = 0
.....


cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_firmware_info | egrep "ME|VBIOS"
ME feature version: 39, firmware version: 0x00000097
MEC feature version: 39, firmware version: 0x000002b5
MEC2 feature version: 39, firmware version: 0x000002b5
VBIOS version: 113-C75100-030

cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/1/amdgpu_firmware_info | egrep "ME|VBIOS"
ME feature version: 49, firmware version: 0x000000a5
MEC feature version: 49, firmware version: 0x000002d3
VBIOS version: BR46776.100
4

Apologies. vulkan-amdgpu is 22.20-1438746 downloaded from the AMD website, as is the amdgpu driver. Kernel is kernel-default-5.14.21-150400.24.21.2

For what it’s worth, I just discovered the vkmark command and Vulkan apparently does work, but the X-Plane installer still won’t run. I’m updating mesa to 22.2 and I’ll see if there is any change.


ronnie@RYZEN9:~> vkmark 
======================================================= 
    vkmark 2017.08 
======================================================= 
    Vendor ID:      0x1002 
    Device ID:      0x67DF 
    Device Name:    AMD Radeon (TM) RX 480 Graphics 
    Driver Version: 8388829 
    Device UUID:    41cfa43130c9531b91f48a4e160ccae1 
======================================================= 
[vertex] device-local=true: FPS: 11561 FrameTime: 0.086 ms 
======================================================= 
                                   vkmark Score: 11561 
======================================================= 
ronnie@RYZEN9:~> vkmark 
======================================================= 
    vkmark 2017.08 
======================================================= 
    Vendor ID:      0x1002 
    Device ID:      0x67DF 
    Device Name:    AMD Radeon (TM) RX 480 Graphics 
    Driver Version: 8388829 
    Device UUID:    41cfa43130c9531b91f48a4e160ccae1 
======================================================= 
[vertex] device-local=true: FPS: 11523 FrameTime: 0.087 ms 
[vertex] device-local=false: FPS: 8323 FrameTime: 0.120 ms 
[texture] anisotropy=0: FPS: 11964 FrameTime: 0.084 ms 
[texture] anisotropy=16: FPS: 11923 FrameTime: 0.084 ms 
[shading] shading=gouraud: FPS: 11524 FrameTime: 0.087 ms 
[shading] shading=blinn-phong-inf: FPS: 11381 FrameTime: 0.088 ms 
[shading] shading=phong: FPS: 11502 FrameTime: 0.087 ms 
[shading] shading=cel: FPS: 11610 FrameTime: 0.086 ms 
[effect2d] kernel=edge: FPS: 12490 FrameTime: 0.080 ms 
[effect2d] kernel=blur: FPS: 9580 FrameTime: 0.104 ms 
[desktop] <default>: FPS: 9856 FrameTime: 0.101 ms 
[cube] <default>: FPS: 12453 FrameTime: 0.080 ms 
[clear] <default>: FPS: 15344 FrameTime: 0.065 ms 
======================================================= 
                                   vkmark Score: 11497 
=======================================================
5

Mesa was installed by default, but may not be new enough to satisfy what X-Plane wants. Vulkan seems to work fine on my machine, using vkmark. Their software seems to generally work on Debian based distros such as Ubuntu, but I have used openSUSE since 2007 and feel no need to change. Rather than adding countless repos trying to modify my system, I’ll wait and see if they give me a better response to my questions on their software. X-Plane 12 works under Windows 11 on this machine, so that will do for now. If they want me to purchase it, they will have to do better. Thank you for your time.

6

Video Card: a Vulkan 1.3-capable video card from NVIDIA or AMD with at least 2 GB VRAM

That means Mesa 22.0 or newer.
Delete AMD drivers to get rid of amdvlk, or use parameter to choose needed driver.