What About the New amd Drivers I keep Hearing About?
 

In Mint 18 (and any distro past 14.04), lots of people had video problems, especially with dual video. Because Mint used xorg 1.18, they couldn't use the fglrx driver.

People said there will be an update later this year. As I keep waiting and waiting for an update, I keep hearing about updated linux amd video drivers.

Take the new kaOS distro, it says;
"included support for many more ATI/Radeon cards to start using the amdgpu driver."

I also hear something about a kernel update that fixes video.

How is there a way to find out if this has fixed the dual blank monitors problem in the distors after 14.04? Does this new update work in Mint 18?

Thank you,
Chris.

fglrx supports newer cards only. Updates are slow. Get used to it or complain to amd.
When a card is older, even quite old and embarrassing like my RS690[=R4xx] OSS still supports it. Around kernel 3.19.x they patched for a screen blanking bug that had been introduced.
Distros usually supply OSS & Mesa. If you go for fglrx, it overwrites some Mesa libs, so it's either one or the other. The way to find out if something works is to try the latest version on your hardware, updating as necessary.

The fglrx driver I had in 14.04 supported older hardware. The new open source was for the newer hardware, replacing the older fglrx.

"Updates are slow." I know that, it was supposed to take all the way until the "fall" to get fixed. It's past that now and I see posts where the new amd drivers are out.

"if you go for fglrx" I can't 'go for fglrx,' it doesn't work past 14.04. I tried for a year. I want to go for the open source driver that fixes the problem that people said would come out in late summer or fall.

Chris.

From experience, when you are transitioning fglrx --> OSS, you need the latest versions of

xorg-server
libdrm
libpixman
Mesa
AMD OSS Driver package
LLVM (only if you need it)
& Whatever they need in the way of updates to various libs.

In my case, I tried to make the transition on a less-than-new distro, and several things chose to fall over, so an upgrade was easiest. fglrx takes an /uninstall (or was it --uninstall?) option which gives you back the Mesa libGL stuff.

Clem said the same thing

I don't believe that's true, and I think clem has been wrong before.

Chris.

fglrx is dead. It will never support a newer Xorg. amdgpu-pro is it's replacement. amdgpu is the new open source driver, amdgpu-pro is the new "proprietary" driver. It's actually just proprietary extensions to the open source driver to improve performance.

Haven't used them personally, so can't speak to their stability, capabilities, or compatibility.

Is fglrx dead? It's not a moment before time. I haven't looked in a while, as I haven't had anything it would run on. My old HP laptop had AMD, but it was bankrupt stock and the card was nearly obsolete by the time I got linux running on it.

Sorry I was not able to put it clearly.

Anything past 14.04 can't use fgrlx drivers, so we have to use the open source ones. The open source drivers don't work for lots of people trying to use dual monitors.

Since open source doesn't work (for a lot of people), people kept saying that "later" or by the end of summer an update to the open source driver would come out.

I keep hearing about updates to the open source driver. That's what the question was about. Not expecting an updated flgrx driver.

In fact, I heard of another update since I posted this.

Thanks,
Chris.

The updated open source drivers are the amdgpu drivers. Radeon also won't be getting updated. However, you have to have at least 4.7 (I think) kernel to get the amdgpu drivers.

amdgpu = open source, updated drivers
amdgpu-pro = closed source enhancements to open source drivers.

Wow, here it is again!!

"Linux Kernel.. Improves Wireless and AMDGPU Drivers... "It changes a total of 77 files, with 595 insertions and 238 deletions."

OK, good. Lots of computers don't work with AMDGPU Drivers (blank screens). We are supposed to get updated drivers that will work. Other things that get updated say stuff like; "fixes this or that." Any way to know what this fixes? Is this the update we've been waiting for that fixes the display problems?

Thank you,
Chris.

What card do you actually have? If you have one that works with amdgpu, those drivers are actually quite good (I realized one of my laptops DOES have an APU that uses the amdgpu drivers).

Link for Kernel 4.8.11 announcement, including AMDGPU driver updates:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/linux...s-510535.shtml

The link you posted is the page I read to start this thread. Doesn't answer the question.

I have an AMD, Radeon HD, 6410D. Dual video does not work with AMDGPU. The drivers are actually not that good if lots and lots of people can't use them. The forums are full of them.


Thank you,
Chris.

I'm surprised anything works on the 6410D with amdgpu. Simply put, that isn't supported, its' too old. I'd blacklist amdgpu and use radeon instead. Currently only GCN 1.2 cards are support, with experimental support for GCN 1.1. Even the older GCN 1.0 isn't yet supported, and the A4 3300, from what I understand, isn't even GCN (hard to tell with their convoluted naming), so if that's right, it'll never be supported by amdgpu.