Can you upgrade Slackware 14.2's video driver without breaking the entire x/?
by fsLeg from LinuxQuestions.org on (#55Q8P)
Hello. I just bought a new laptop, ASUS TUF FX505DU and, obviously, wanted to install Slackware on it. I just took the SSD from my old laptop, tweaked some settings, and successfully booted the system. Unfortunately, stock Slackware 14.2 kernel doesn't seem to support a lot of things on the new laptop. But when I booted alienBOB's Slackware Live everything seemed to work just fine, so I just took the kernel from there and the result was better. However, I still couldn't start X, so I started investigating.
On stock kernel even KMS didn't work, so I assumed it was the kernel module. And indeed, after upgrading to Slackware Live's kernel the console was nice and high resolutioned. But kernel module alone isn't enough to start X. xf86-video-amdgpu was too old to support AMD Ryzen 7 3750H. Same for Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660Ti: xf86-video-nouveau was too old. And for proprietary driver I use bumblebee which isn't any good for using with X11, not that I would've liked to use Nvidia card as a primary one. So the only way seems to be upgrading.
I tried to compile the sources of xf86-video-amdgpu from -current, but that required newer libdrm. I assumed upgrading that would break a lot of things, so I didn't, and here I am.
To reiterate my question, can I upgrade the video driver (xf86-video-amdgpu) without breaking and rebuilding the entire x/? Or would it be much more hassle than switching to -current? Personally, I like everything to just work, so I stick to stable releases, and -current occasionally breaks things, especially third-party packages, and I can't be bothered to fix those every time Pat releases some major library update, but 14.2 is way too old at this point, and 15 doesn't look like it's gonna be released any time soon.
Sorry if I got some packages' names wrong, I'm writing from memory as, well, I can't really post from Slackware.
On stock kernel even KMS didn't work, so I assumed it was the kernel module. And indeed, after upgrading to Slackware Live's kernel the console was nice and high resolutioned. But kernel module alone isn't enough to start X. xf86-video-amdgpu was too old to support AMD Ryzen 7 3750H. Same for Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660Ti: xf86-video-nouveau was too old. And for proprietary driver I use bumblebee which isn't any good for using with X11, not that I would've liked to use Nvidia card as a primary one. So the only way seems to be upgrading.
I tried to compile the sources of xf86-video-amdgpu from -current, but that required newer libdrm. I assumed upgrading that would break a lot of things, so I didn't, and here I am.
To reiterate my question, can I upgrade the video driver (xf86-video-amdgpu) without breaking and rebuilding the entire x/? Or would it be much more hassle than switching to -current? Personally, I like everything to just work, so I stick to stable releases, and -current occasionally breaks things, especially third-party packages, and I can't be bothered to fix those every time Pat releases some major library update, but 14.2 is way too old at this point, and 15 doesn't look like it's gonna be released any time soon.
Sorry if I got some packages' names wrong, I'm writing from memory as, well, I can't really post from Slackware.