Mining ETH with AMD GPU Ubuntu 21.10

Question

I want to mine ethereum with my gpu (rx580). After doing a bit of research, I found out that I need openCL and to get that I have to install the AMD gpu driver. Because I am on Ubuntu 21.10, the driver is not officially supported and when I tried to install it, it did not install properly. When I rebooted, the OS was bricked. It showed my the equivalent of a blue screen every time I rebooted. After reinstalling Ubuntu (but the same version) I still want to mine eth. Is there a way to do that without the amdgpu driver?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I recently switched over to this latest version of ubuntu and I have a (relatively)quick & dirty fix that should get the opencl drivers installed enough to mine on this version of ubuntu. This tutorial covers one way of doing it and uses the same GPU you have(rx580) so use it for reference or try their way if my way fails: https://dazeb.uk/how-to-install-amd-opencl-gpu-drivers-on-ubuntu-21-04-for-mining-ethereum/.

HAVE A BACKUP FOLDER WITH AMDGPU DRIVERS THAT YOU EITHER KNOW YOU CAN INSTALL OR YOU KNOW IS A FULL DRIVER PACKAGE FROM AMD W/ THE AMDGPU-INSTALL SCRIPT IN IT(this may not be necessary to do in 21.10 as the distributed GPU drivers are working and can be easily accessed. But is worth noting as it was required when doing this on earlier releases, otherwise you would risk losing the GPU drivers and have to download them from shell if you need to recover the system after a bad install)

force OCL install for GPU mining

1. get older AMDGPU drivers (these are for 6000 series not sure if package is specific to this) .

wget --referer https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-amdgpu-unified-linux-21-30 https://drivers.amd.com/drivers/linux/amdgpu-pro-21.30-1290604-ubuntu-20.04.tar.xz

2. extract the contents.

tar -xvf amdgpu-pro-21.30-1290604-ubuntu-20.04.tar.xz cd amdgpu-pro-21.30-1290604-ubuntu-20.04/

3. Next you need to install specific packages from this tarball. Find these packages and install them, if it complains it needs a dependency then find that and run the same command on the dependency package. After this you can go back and install the one that was dependent on it. Packages:

• amdgpu-pro-core
• libopencl1-amdgpu-pro
• clinfo-amdgpu-pro
• opencl-amdgpu-pro-icd

install with

sudo dpkg -i (followed by name of specific package must have .deb extention cannot just use generic name)

4. if you run into the unfortunate case where the GPU drivers break after running this dpkg script & restarting the system, you need to get access to the shell and type amdgpu-uninstall. Afterwards you could run ./amdgpu-install on a known working version to restore the graphics drivers. Reboot to see if this works, if not you can run amdgpu-uninstall then try to sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade to restore normal gpu drivers if possible. It is only likely this will happen if you uninstall a few incompatible packages, the ones above should be fine. In the case that you run the amdgpu-uninstall script and opencl is not working after boot you will have to reinstall the packages making sure not to install any incompatible ones by accident. I have a successful version of 21.10 mining using this version of opencl. I also am not using a custom amdgpu driver, the ones I am using are default packages for this distribution. I only recommend having a backup incase this doesn't work but I also cant guarantee the backup ./amdgpu-install would work better than trying to get the default drivers from amdgpu-uninstall && sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade just mentioning it in case of an emergency.

5. Testing opencl.

   To test opencl install clinfo: sudo apt-get install clinfo then Run clinfo and make sure it shows

number of platforms 1 (or more if you have more cards).

Hope this works for you, happy mining cheers!