I update my Manjaro systems periodically and i was having trouble with the updates for a while now. If the issues are workable i usually wait until the next version, however my systems are still broken.
All my Manjaro systems use Radeon 7000 series cards, running the amdgpu driver, vulkan and vaapi. The amdgpu driver still loads, but vulkan and vaapi are broken. This causes firefox to frequently crash.
$ lspci -k | grep -A 3 -E "(VGA|3D)"
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Tahiti PRO [Radeon HD 7950/8950 OEM / R9 280]
Subsystem: Hightech Information System Ltd. Device 3000
Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu
$ firefox
[GFX1-]: glxtest: VA-API test failed: no supported VAAPI profile found.
ATTENTION: default value of option mesa_glthread overridden by environment.
[2023-02-11T13:45:06Z ERROR mp4parse] Found 2 nul bytes in "\0\0"
Kernel 6.2 and 5.14 tested, using unstable branch. I don’t have any trouble on my Arch systems.
I think Arch did the right thing here, this is basic stuff and it just needs to work. Otherwise you risk losing users, right?
I did make a backup of the mirrorlist I’m just away for as long as this debacle runs with the patents, i have stuff to do and only so much time for the Linux hobby.
But thanks for the link to the fix anyway, that was rather hidden if i may say so.
My real problem is that i advised/put a lot of users on Manjaro. They’re gonna keep complaining about this issue and leave if it isn’t fixed. Any idea if there is a solution on the horizon? Not sure if they are able to compile mesa-nonfree.
Well I am not a lawyer, but I guess the basic thing I understood about the patents:
If you provide a Distro which has these codecs preinstalled, then you are affected and potentially they could come demand for license fees. Just like hardware players comes with prebuild hardware codecs.
That is not the case on ArchLinux, because you put the parts yourself together. So it is the choice of the user, not of the provider. Therefore they don’t have to follow upstream and are not affected.
If there will be an optional package, which comes from AMD, just like from INTEL and can be optional installed, then this would be a good solution for everyone, but at the moment hardware decoding on AMD is open source and baked into mesa.
The only solution for AMD is just recompiling it yourself.
Ok well. Seems to be a valid solution, quite not very optimal, but a good workaround without recompiling.
I still think that the problem should not be solved downstream.
And no, NVIDIA, AMD or INTEL don’t pay license fees. The licence fees goes to the vendors which provide a full solution. Same goes for Windows. The drivers are not part of Windows, but additionally installed, therefore Windows is not affected.