raymac46 Posted January 24, 2017 Author Share Posted January 24, 2017 (edited) History of AMD video as I experienced it: 2008 : AMD FOSS bad, proprietary OK. 2011: AMD proprietary phased out for a lot of legacy cards, FOSS improving but still sucky. 2013: FOSS radeon working really well, no need for proprietary unless you want to do 3D gaming. 2016: FOSS radeon fails with certain newer cards, proprietary OK but won't be supported in newer versions of X. The combined new amdgpu driver crashes many recent cards, only works with leading edge hardware. A mess. 2017: Looks as if FOSS amdgpu has finally got its act together - very nice, as good as it was 4 years ago. Proprietary is dead. In the meantime you could have cruised along with nouveau or the superior nvidia proprietary driver without seeing any of this AMD aggravation. Live and learn. Edited January 24, 2017 by raymac46 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 I never had much of a problem with Radeon cards but then again, I used the closed Catalyst driver. I switched back to Nvidia last year but it had nothing to do with compatibility with Linux.. Of course, as Sunrat mentioned, I had to hold the Xorg package back moreso than not. It would finally catch up and then a new version of Catalyst would come out.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted January 24, 2017 Author Share Posted January 24, 2017 While it's a little inconvenient right now (and poorly implemented, IMO), this looks like a pretty forward-thinking move by AMD-ATI to position themselves as the GPU of choice for Linux/Steam gamers. Yes this is the thought that has kept me from ripping out a perfectly good AMD R7 card and using it for Frisbee practice against a brick wall. And maybe they are getting there at last. Now if only they don't screw it up again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted January 24, 2017 Author Share Posted January 24, 2017 I never had much of a problem with Radeon cards but then again, I used the closed Catalyst driver. I switched back to Nvidia last year but it had nothing to do with compatibility with Linux.. Of course, as Sunrat mentioned, I had to hold the Xorg package back moreso than not. It would finally catch up and then a new version of Catalyst would come out.. Yes you were wise to go back to Nvidia when you did as all the aggravation started shortly thereafter. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 I've never really had any issues with AMD/ATI. Then again, I've ALWAYS used the FOSS driver. I don't game, or anything else terribly graphics intensive, so I couldn't care less about the proprietary driver. Although I certainly understand why some want/need it. I tried the Catalyst driver at one point and didn't really notice any difference, so I figured I might as well just use the open source driver. At this time, since my switch to Linux circa 2009ish, I've had the following: - an nVidia discrete card on my first Linux machine (Ubuntu 9.10). I used the open source driver on a 8300(?) series discrete card. - an onboard AMD/ATI APU (not sure of series, but the APU was an AMD-FX6200) on my Frankenputer1 (Ubuntu 12.04, later 14.04). I tried the proprietary driver, but switched to FOSS. - on the same Frankenputer1, i put a discrete ATI Radeon HD 6450 card because I wanted to offload any APU graphics processing to a GPU. (Ubuntu 14.04, currently Lubuntu/MimeticDE 16.04). Using FOSS Radeon driver. - on my current Frankenputer2, I have an Intel Xeon 4th Gen integrated APU, which appears to be the Intel 4600 series GPU (Lubuntu/MimeticDE 16.04). Looks like I'm using the i915 driver...again FOSS. So I've had experience with each manufacturer. For me, the open source driver has worked just fine for MY needs and, more importantly, has been supremely stable with no graphics issues. Maybe proprietary would be better, but I wouldn't know as I haven't used that driver long enough on any one machine, nor consistently across multiple machines/configurations. For me, FOSS is the way to go. I imagine this would be sufficient for the vast majority of users, as I think I'm a pretty typical and average Linux user. While my experience(s) have been good, I can't imagine the horror and resultant headache of booting up my machine to a resultant black screen (or a snow screen?) that worked just fine yesterday. Maybe I've been lucky (knock on wood!), but at least I've got multiple machines and a working internet connection to google/troubleshoot. Can you imagine that scenario when it happens on your ONLY machine? (shudders!) 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted January 24, 2017 Author Share Posted January 24, 2017 I am a big fan of the FOSS graphics stack as well, and my AMD problems were more bad luck & hardware based than anything else. My graphics card was too new to be supported by the older radeon driver and not new enough to work with the amdgpu driver - at least in its early stages. It looks as if AMD has its FOSS/Catalyst hybrid working well now with GCN 1.1 architecture so most mainstream distros are going to be OK. Why AMD would continue to market the older architecture knowing it wouldn't work with Linux FOSS is a mystery to me. At least for a while you could hang in with an older version of Linux Mint that worked with the Catalyst driver. It goes without saying that if the desktop in question were my only unit I would not have been so cavalier about choosing an AMD discrete card. The mobo did have an older gen APU that would work with radeon. It was more an intellectual challenge than anything else to get the AMD card working. One thing I have re-learned is that if an in situ upgrade has multiple stages there's a good chance that an intermediate stage may bork your system. It's best to do this sort of upgrade with a clean install. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted January 24, 2017 Author Share Posted January 24, 2017 One good thing to come out of all this was that I had the chance to rewire the SATA cables for my hard drives which I had put the wrong way round when I built the machine. my boot drive (an SSD) is now sda instead of sdb. The BIOS has it all figured out the right way now. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 One good thing to come out of all this was that I had the chance to rewire the SATA cables for my hard drives which I had put the wrong way round when I built the machine. my boot drive (an SSD) is now sda instead of sdb. The BIOS has it all figured out the right way now. Nice but that is why I prefer UUID's instead of /dev/sd* when booting, That way no matter the device order, the correct drives will boot in order. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted January 24, 2017 Share Posted January 24, 2017 There's a good chance your description of hardware "too new to be supported by the older radeon driver and not new enough to work with the amdgpu driver" probably would've nailed me too. Through trial and error, I have developed a "sweet spot" philosophy of hardware on linux. When I'm hardware shopping, I purposefully try to avoid hardware/tech that I think MAY be old enough to lose support, but will have a useful life beyond that period. I look for newer tech....new enough to be considered "latest & greatest", but not so late & great that it's "bleeding edge". Instead of the hardware that just came out "yesterday", I look for hardware that came out "last week". With that said, it sounds like my hardware preferences would've placed me squarely within that AMDGPU gap also! I guess I just got lucky... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted January 24, 2017 Author Share Posted January 24, 2017 One good thing to come out of all this was that I had the chance to rewire the SATA cables for my hard drives which I had put the wrong way round when I built the machine. my boot drive (an SSD) is now sda instead of sdb. The BIOS has it all figured out the right way now. Nice but that is why I prefer UUID's instead of /dev/sd* when booting, That way no matter the device order, the correct drives will boot in order. My fstab uses UUIDs as well. A bit trickier to get all the numbers right, but you know it's gonna work. My old install worked just fine booting off of sdb, it just looked weird. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted January 24, 2017 Author Share Posted January 24, 2017 Through trial and error, I have developed a "sweet spot" philosophy of hardware on linux. Precisely my philosophy as well in choosing the R7 360. It was "last year's" technology recycled into a slightly faster card at a low cost. How could I know that the card wouldn't be in the support table for the older radeon driver because AMD had plans to make it work with the newer GCN based amdgpu? How could I know that AMD decided to get the newest GCN cards working with Linux and then backport the driver to older cards? How could I know that the 4.X kernels would have problems with AMD drivers? Oy..what a comedy of errors. If I hadn't been taking the long view on this, knowing that AMD would eventually get things sorted...well they have at last. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted January 26, 2017 Author Share Posted January 26, 2017 By the way after some checking I have found that with Kernel 4.4 in Linux Mint 18.1 I am NOT running the amdgpu driver with my video card. Apparently AMD fixed things so that in this kernel at least the radeon driver now recognizes the R7 360 video card and that's what is loaded. This is my old favorite open source driver I've wanted to use for a year or so. It always gave excellent performance in desktop use. To use the amdgpu driver I'd need a more bleeding edge Kernel, version of Mesa, Xorg - yada yada yada. I don't think I'll worry about that for a few years. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 I am kind of surprised that LM 18.1 is using the LTS kernel as their default.. The stable kernel is now at 4.9.6 as of today: https://www.kernel.org/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted January 26, 2017 Author Share Posted January 26, 2017 There is an option to upgrade to kernel 4.5. LM18.1 is based upon Ubuntu 16.04 so it's a bit behind the times. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 Ah, ok. That makes sense Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 I'm still running the zippy little 3.10.104 kernel. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 Mine: comhack@Cerberus ~ % uname -aLinux Cerberus 4.9.6-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jan 16 06:40:51 CET 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 Stock MX-16 kernel here. If it ain't broke... roger@mxbrain:~ $ uname -a Linux mxbrain 4.7.0-0.bpo.1-amd64 #1 SMP MX 4.7.8-1mx16+2 (2016-12-08) x86_64 GNU/Linux Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted January 26, 2017 Author Share Posted January 26, 2017 Since I have a long way from bleeding edge hardware I am happy with trailing edge software - all I ask is that I get an appropriate combination of kernel and graphics stack components so I can use some sort of FOSS AMD driver. I couldn't do that with my video card and Linux Mint until this most recent release (18.1) All's well that ends well I guess but I still feel AMD slapped me around a bit because I was loyal and bought AMD hardware for video. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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