AMD Catalyst 12.6 For Linux Disappoints

[TobiSGD]

I feel like i should be growing a goatee.

Seriously, though, I have never, ever, heard this complaint before that final releases should include more feature changes from betas. At least not that i can remember off the top of my head.

It's one thing to say that the final product sucks. Complaining about the release process not throwing in extra untested and possibly bug-producing changes at the last minute is a different argument.

Right, beta testing is not for adding extras. No one has said that they should add extras, but why do they make beta tests if they don't intend to fix the bugs the people find before the final release? That is what beta testing is for.

[Agross]

I would like to add something here :

About two month ago I bought the first A10 notebook that came on the market ( where I live, anyway ), an Acer V3 with an A10-4600M APU + dedicated 7670M video card.

From the begging it was all a pain in the ass. No drivers for either linux or windows : Acer shipped it with a CD with a bad 'VGA' driver only (for windows) that didn't work.

Alas, the catalyst 12.6 beta came and it worked ok-ish on windows ( not that I use windows very much, but sine the laptop was unusable in linux I had to ) and I finally got some semblance of a driver for Linux. Aside from the annoying watermark with 'unsupported driver' I find the 'capabilities' of the Linux driver laughable. It can't handle multi-monitor without restart, It can't handle switching between integrated gpu in the apu and the discrete gpu, you have to manually select one and reboot and the performance in pts and such is rather disappointing, from a laptop with a quad core that overclocks up to 3.2 GHz ( it really does work ), 16 GB DDR3 1600 and an SSD.

I have a Phenom X6 with a gf 450 on it as my desktop and it mops the floor with ATI both in native games and in games played through wine. Also, I tried a few OpenCL samples that simply don't work with the fglrx.

Now, on to the new driver 12.6 'stable', to my surprise it simply does not work. It generates a wrong xorg.conf from which xserver can't start and if I try to hack it 'by hand' from the 12.6 beta it crashes with stable 3.2 and 3.4 kernels. I had to revert to 12.6 beta.

Also I tried the open source driver but it seems trinity crossfired with a 7xxxM was too much for it, it is basically unusable. Note that without the amd blob you can't shut down the dedicated gpu so the laptop gets too hot to handle simply by having a xfce with a terminal with vim in it ...

Clearly this is my last AMD purchase with regards to video cards. Unfortunately, since you can't buy an AMD mobile cpu paired with an nVidia gpu, I'll have to pick an Intel notebook or, if ARM64 shapes up, hopefully an ARM-based laptop.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

How you install driver? Generate packages?

Aside from the annoying watermark with 'unsupported driver'

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...871#post272871

It can't handle multi-monitor without restart

May you register bugreport about this?

It can't handle switching between integrated gpu in the apu and the discrete gpu, you have to manually select one

Select where? In CCC?

and reboot and the performance in pts and such is rather disappointing

Upload results to openbenchmarking.org, register bugreport with links to openbenchmarking.org.

Also, I tried a few OpenCL samples that simply don't work with the fglrx.

What samples? What exactly doesn't work? On igpu or on dgpu?

Now, on to the new driver 12.6 'stable', to my surprise it simply does not work. It generates a wrong xorg.conf from which xserver can't start

Register bugreport, attach example of broken xorg.conf and describe how you generate it.

and if I try to hack it 'by hand' from the 12.6 beta it crashes with stable 3.2 and 3.4 kernels.

Crashlog?

Also I tried the open source driver but it seems trinity crossfired with a 7xxxM was too much for it

Version of kernel and open source driver? Linux distribution? (There is no CrossFire support by the way, FOSS driver run only igpu at this moment.)

Note that without the amd blob you can't shut down the dedicated gpu

You can, put

echo "OFF" > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

to /etc/rc.local.

Don't forget to attach report generated by atigetsysteminfo.sh script to bugreports that you'll register.

[GrrlTlak]

Yes. Go and sell your new computer and avoid anything which has a connection to AMD /ATI in the future. I'm stuck with Windows for the same reason; a 1 year old laptop with dropped driver support - funny enough the graphic-chip is still sold openly. But no FUNCTIONAL driver for it was available at ANY time. This company (AMD /ATI) truely is the one and only company i really do hate.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

I'm stuck with Windows for the same reason; a 1 year old laptop with dropped driver support

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEzNDA

[GrrlTlak]

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEzNDA

Yes. A new legacy driver release and the same old non-functionality. I'm impressed.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

non-functionality

When I see something like this, I want to reply WORKSFORME. (After looking into your posts history) You talking about Gnome Shell bug, right? (Commentary 14.)

[GrrlTlak]

When I see something like this, I want to reply WORKSFORME. (After looking into your posts history) You talking about Gnome Shell bug, right? (Commentary 14.)

No, not only Gnome-Shell - those posts were just the beginning. If it works for you - congratulations!

[cutterjohn]

OK, I essentially joined this forum for this one post to AMD.

So just to be clear, a few years of doggy binary blobs that only just started to work correctly and then support gets dropped in fav of a opensource driver that should have been worked on in the first place _before_ release, much like Intel which seem to be just fine at doing just this.

This is so fucking ridiculous, you are essentially criminals who are not selling products fit for consumers.
Someone has to say it direct, sorry!

I simply don't go out and buy a car and then get told;
"sorry, write the EMC firmware yourself and oh be thankful we are so nice these days we _may_ provide docs 6 months later on the EMC for your DIY car."

Get it throw your heads, Your billion dollar company should *NOT* be selling DIY products, this is not the 1980's any more when computers were kits.
I fully expect to buy a product and have working drivers, cabals, plugs or whatever else is expected for your products to preform their `advertised' and thus required duties, END OF!

I don't know what everyones problem is with Nvidia, they sell a product with associated policies (which I can understand people could disagree with). However, their products work just perfectly as `advertised'. The lack of Optimus support is really half a issue with Linux and lack of API's in both Xorg and the kernel which granted have recently got better. However that is unfair to blame Nvidia for lack of kernel knobs.

How about this, AMD FUCK YOU! That also goes to people sticking up for a company that has ample `fiscal' resource, who quite frankly is screwing you too.
To quote Wilfred Owen; "To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori."
That is to say, don't get patriotic about a company. A company is not a human. Cut the fan boy crap guys.

Oh and by the way, I could not give a shit about excuses of legal problems about HDMI code or whatever, if you can't make hardware/software that is workable to the person paying you money then don't release, license or whatever that design because no one cares about a god given designed that can't be used.

Its 2012, Sort it out!

Apologies for the colorful language to other perhaps younger sorts. </rant>

THIS is why when building my desktop this summer I went with an eVGA GTX670 FTW. No more ultracraptastic linux(and windows although not quite as awful as linux) drivers. Never AMD/ATI again, esp. with their dropping support left and right!

Freaking nVidia drivers support back to what? GF2 FFS!

AMD/ATI are just allaround phail. They phail at CPU R&D(hence 3930k in desktop), and they phail as drivers. The only thing that seem to get kind of right is price for their CPUs(but they're forced into that by subpar design, hey how are those P4 clock speed jokes working for you guys now? (I had an AMD x2 back then as they still had a clue about R&D.) And their actual GPU design seems to be OK, but that's COMPLETELY foiled by the craptastic drivers.

i.e. when the MSI GT725 goes for it's scheduled replacement next summer, that shiny new notebook won't be sporting any AMD crap, unless by some miracle they actually pull a competitive CPU design out of their ---es. GPU's never going to happen again. Burned too many times by ATI and their driver delivery hasn't gotten appreciatively better over the last decade. (I abandoned them for years, before because of their crap software, then gave them a shot with the mobility 4850, but that just showed me how right it was to stick w/nVidia. I really don't give a rat's --- about OSS driver either as long as they're supplying enough to get their BLOBs running with newer kernels and X.org...)

[EDIT]
As to the DIY stuff and linux: I might've bought that 18 years ago when you had to bootstrap everything, i.e. build gcc to selfhosting, re-compile kernel, build X11R6, etc.

But in the last 10y the fact of the matter is that I rarely bother to do any custom builds. The slight potential perf. gains just aren't worth the trouble
[/EDIT]

[barkas]

THIS is why when building my desktop this summer I went with an eVGA GTX670 FTW. No more ultracraptastic linux(and windows although not quite as awful as linux) drivers. Never AMD/ATI again, esp. with their dropping support left and right!

Freaking nVidia drivers support back to what? GF2 FFS!

AMD/ATI are just allaround phail. They phail at CPU R&D(hence 3930k in desktop), and they phail as drivers. The only thing that seem to get kind of right is price for their CPUs(but they're forced into that by subpar design, hey how are those P4 clock speed jokes working for you guys now? (I had an AMD x2 back then as they still had a clue about R&D.) And their actual GPU design seems to be OK, but that's COMPLETELY foiled by the craptastic drivers.

i.e. when the MSI GT725 goes for it's scheduled replacement next summer, that shiny new notebook won't be sporting any AMD crap, unless by some miracle they actually pull a competitive CPU design out of their ---es. GPU's never going to happen again. Burned too many times by ATI and their driver delivery hasn't gotten appreciatively better over the last decade. (I abandoned them for years, before because of their crap software, then gave them a shot with the mobility 4850, but that just showed me how right it was to stick w/nVidia. I really don't give a rat's --- about OSS driver either as long as they're supplying enough to get their BLOBs running with newer kernels and X.org...)

[EDIT]
As to the DIY stuff and linux: I might've bought that 18 years ago when you had to bootstrap everything, i.e. build gcc to selfhosting, re-compile kernel, build X11R6, etc.

But in the last 10y the fact of the matter is that I rarely bother to do any custom builds. The slight potential perf. gains just aren't worth the trouble
[/EDIT]

I'm so happy for you. Please post that story in every thread in every ATI subforum here.