Kernel 4.9 and Latest Mesa
 

How can I update to kernel 4.9 and latest Mesa and LLVM?. Do I need current?. I don't want to use FGLRX. 4.9 supports my card.

-current already has the latest LLVM and is only one patch release off of the latest mesa (-current has 13.0.1 and their latest is 13.0.2, which Pat will probably update to soon).

The big thing will be getting kernel 4.9. Right now, Slackware has the 4.4.38 kernel with a config in the testing/ folder for 4.6. You can use that config as a basis for building the 4.9 kernel, but there will be a lot of questions when you run make oldconfig. Either way, until Pat bumps -current up to 4.9, you'll have to build it yourself.

You can't use fglrx on Slackware 14.2 and newer. AMD doesn't support Xorg 1.18 and newer with that driver. They rely on amdgpu-pro for 1.18, but I haven't found if their newest driver supports 1.19. But, it is just an addon over their opensource amdgpu module, so amdgpu will be supported no matter what your xorg version is, you may just not get the extra "pro" features if it doesn't support the latest xorg.

One of the best tips I ever got here.

We don't have the latest LLVM yet. We're at 3.8.1. Version 3.9.0 was released in September.

Yeah, that can be a handy tool to use, but since it isn't included in Slackware's kernel building page on the SlackWiki, I wasn't sure if it is a recommended route.

Oops, I accidentally looked at LVM on distrowatch instead of llvm. We do have the latest lvm version ;)

@OP (Quicken2k):

which AMD GPU is in question?

Unfortunately, there are options in old config which has new names in the new one, for them the old config settings will not be preserved and will be converted to default.

HD 7000 series which AMDGPU open source driver has full support for with Kernel 4.9, Mesa, LLVM, not sure the version's
Needed for Mesa or LLVM will find out though.

I had both HD7750 and HD7730 (still use the later)

Said GPUs where perfectly supported by Slackware "vanilla" 14.2 already: I had even games run under Wine at better FPS than on native Windows host.

While I do look forward to next release, and the ever better OSS support, I wouldn't really have any complaints in current 14.2's state of affairs.

FWIW

While the radeon support is generally pretty good for those cards, amdgpu itself promises to provide more features like OpenCL and wayland support (although, it looks like performance still has a way to go).

That being said, as with you, I'm plenty happy with the current state of the radeon driver with my hardware.

Sadly some (most?) games are in a sad state of over-patched binary cludges that are made to operate with similarly over-patched binary "WHQL" drivers.

Said state, in effect, renders the current MESA/LLVM/X cooperation somewhat insufficient:

While the titles "make" it, there are some "artifacts" rendered that spoil both the spirit and the atmosphere of the game.

I can game fine with nouveau, I just don't use malware like steam. Recently there has been improvements in mesa and dolphin-emu which changed it from too slow to play with most games to full speed with most games. :)
Nouveau reclocking is currently required for this however.

What is the point of using terms like this? Per Google, malware is defined as: software that is intended to damage or disable computers and computer systems. Steam doesn't do that on any of my systems. In fact, it is quite self-contained, doesn't spawn extra processes, and doesn't have crazy dependency requirements. It doesn't even start on boot by default. If you don't like the software, that's understandable, but flat out calling it malware seems excessive and unreasonable.

Valve and Steam have been monumental in improving gaming in Linux. The number of AAA titles that have become available to Linux based systems has rapidly increased since Steam added support. They started off with only a few games back in 2013 when it was first released to having over 2000 titles that support Linux as of last month. They, along with Unity and GOG.com helped push more and more games to Linux. Now we even have Unreal Engine 4 and CryEngine.

Steam is malware by definition. Its full of drm in both the client and games. It also calls home without the user's consent. I could go on, but that was not the point of my post and is not the topic in this thread.