Hello,
I just wasted 4 days trying to figure things out and felt the need to document somewhere to hopefully save someone days of their time. I have been a big supporter of AMD since Ryzen was in development, but AMD GPU has really been terrible supporting linux ecosystem.
I have a HP Ryzen 4700U laptop which I use daily in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. When originally purchased, to get it to work I installed the amd proprietary gpu drivers. Things worked well but after some linux kernel updates caused significant issues. Many have documented different issues in the last couple of years.
Since recently the crashes had become too frequent, decided to try to upgrade the amd drivers and that was a bad decision. The latest AMD drivers for the latest kernel or libraries is not supported or do not have the GPU support, so it was impossible to upgrade the driver. Trying to switch back to the previous amd proprietary driver is also not possible since some libraries are not available.
Removing AMD proprietary drivers and switching back to linux drivers caused issues (external monitor would not work, freezes when switching screens fast, etc). Spent a few days going through many different issues and tried a numerous number of documented solutions: mesa drivers, ppa:oibaf, grub changes, etc, etc. Pretty much anything that was recommended was tried except rolling back the kernel to 5.8 which seemed not idea. Even upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 would not solve the issue to recognize the AMD linux GPU driver. Also, the AMD proprietary drivers do not work with 22.04 as of today.
One of the last things I did before putting an order to an NVIDIA laptop was to make a bootable Ubuntu USB which to my amazement worked well and recognized the gpu driver. After a lot of search and comparison, I found that the solution was that the computer had a file
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-amdgpu.conf with the following code
blacklist amdgpu
After commenting that out, everything is working perfectly. File was created during the issues with the update to the AMD proprietary drivers, so the install error or removing the drivers does not appear to remove the file.
Sorry for the long winded description but hope it helps and AMD does better supporting linux in the future.
