AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 Released For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 Released For Linux

AMD has released yet another beta Linux beta driver for the Catalyst 12.11 series...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI0MjA

[Rakot]

Michael, do you know anything about compatibility between intel drivers and catalyst? It is very important for laptop owners with hybrid graphics. Currently catalyst doesn't support intel>=2.20.3. In the mean time official stable driver from the intel web site is 2.20.12. Also catalyst doesn't work properly with Mesa>9.0. It would be good if somebody would shed light on it.

Also there is a work to bring bumblebee to AMD hybrid graphics. But according to this thread, there is a problem with fglrx. I guess it somehow relates to the first part of my message.

[devguy]

Linux changes:

- Resolves stability issues found in the previous AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta8 driver for Linux
- For users experiencing issues with HDMI Audio under Ubuntu 12.04, users should try installing the "dkms-hda - 0.201211291615~precise1" package from https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-a...aily/+packages and reboot; this will resolve the HDMI Audio issue found in Ubuntu 12.04

[storma]

This release fixed the beta8 steam problem.

[grigi]

I recently noticed that my battery life on my notebook effectively halved. from over 6 hours to about 3.5 hours. I then now say that with beta6 they apparently fixed a power management bug introduced in 12.10 affecting some configurations. So, I'm gonna try beta11 and see if it made any difference?

The odd thing was the notebook didn't seem any warmer than usual. If gpu powermanagement is broken, shouldn't it run notably hotter than usual?

[grigi]

Ok, after trying beta11, my battery life seems much better already :-)
It now looks like about 5.5 hours, which is close enough to my original idea of where battery life is :-)

[sfievet]

[QUOTE=Rakot;299824]Michael, do you know anything about compatibility between intel drivers and catalyst? It is very important for laptop owners with hybrid graphics. Currently catalyst doesn't support intel>=2.20.3. In the mean time official stable driver from the intel web site is 2.20.12. Also catalyst doesn't work properly with Mesa>9.0. It would be good if somebody would shed light on it.

I second your remark as I suffer from the exact same problem.
I have a 3820TG (radeon 6550M + Intel HD combo), and fglrx refuses to play nicely with the Intel driver.
I raised this both to AMD :http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=634
and Chris Wilson (Intel driver dev) : https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56494
without success so far.
Chris Wilson said : "There is nothing I can do about this since fglrx plays tricks with the intel hardware without knowledge of the driver."
AMD didn't reply at all. Sad situation, because it seems to affect quite a lot of people...

my 2 cents...
Seb.

[Rakot]

I second your remark as I suffer from the exact same problem.
Chris Wilson said : "There is nothing I can do about this since fglrx plays tricks with the intel hardware without knowledge of the driver."
AMD didn't reply at all. Sad situation, because it seems to affect quite a lot of people...
Seb.

They just don't care. Once we've paid our money, AMD isn't interested in us. Sad but true. fglrx+intel compatibility has been broken for me since catalyst 11.8.
There is at least 3 bug reports in AMD's unofficial bugzilla.

So every time they release new driver, I spend the whole day on trying to find working combination of Mesa and intel driver.
Sometimes I even have some kernel oops.

Is there any catalyst developer around?
Or can Bridgman tell what to do in that situation? The bug reports are there, but no reaction, no release notes.

[bridgman]

I didn't think we supported switchable graphics under Linux; we've always told OEMs to include a BIOS switch for "discrete" or "integrated". On muxless systems the choice is usually "switchable" or "whichever GPU has the display connectors, usually integrated".

I'll ask to see if anything has changed but AFAIK "true" switchable graphics was always "windows only". I think we default to integrated only on AMD+AMD muxless and rely on the BIOS switch for AMD+Intel muxless.

[xpris]

In this beta 11 Catalyst 12.11 in my Mageia 2 x64 the web brower Google Chrome 23 work good on Flash In the other driver is still laggy. In now I don't must use prefix "--blacklist-accelerated-compositing"