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AMD APU & Parsec on Ubuntu 20.04/20.10

I have two AMD integrated graphics systems:

  • Dell Insipiron 5585 w/ AMD Ryzen 3500U APU
  • Desktop w/ AMD Ryzen 3400G APU
AMD linux-firmware on Ubuntu 20.04/20.10

At the time of this writing, Ubuntu 20.10 has kernel support for the AMD APU, but the linux firmware is a little out of date. You can download the newer Hirsute Hippo linux-firmware_1.*_all.deb version here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-firmware

Install the deb package, and reboot to use the new firmware.

Enabling Hardware Accelleration on Parsec

Based on THIS document from Parsec, on non-Intel systems you may need to adjust an environment variable to enable hardware decoding. The following worked for me on my Ryzen systems:

export LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=radeonsi