Ubuntu 14.10's Lack Of X.Org Server 1.16 Gets Blamed On AMD

[dungeon]

Having owned Trinity desktop APUs, and currently owning a Trinity laptop, I can say:
Trinity mobile APUs are amazing on open source drivers. Suspend/resume works fine, they're very fast, VDPAU works, etc. The problem is your distro.

Maybe Trinity/Richland are the in similar situation like 6950 card , not sure but performance issues might be expected on those chips too I mean performance might be OKish but i am somehow curious because of 6950 tests, where radeon driver does not have performance like on VLIW5 or GCN chips .

Of course that is guessing, i don't have any Trinity/Richland APU to test that

[Passso]

So if Microsoft, just releaases their beta at some time and then a few months later they release their next OS version, in the past even with vesa or similiar drivers included (not most recent versions) it was ok, but for canonical they need 2 seperate drivers to work or they dont include it?

Its just stupid, microsoft even broke some soundcard stuff in windows 7 with their new api and they did not care at all, if you really think the opensource driver isnt good enough, and u can update your blob-taint-injector software a while after release isnt good enough, maybe u should release your distri later.

it just makes no sense at all, as a operation system developer (its basicly a fork of GNU...) u dont include other components because a vendor has not the right driver or something. When did Microsoft do that, when did Apple do that? Did they release no DX11 for Windows 7 because the drivers worked poor at the beginning with it or something like that.

Its this we dont care about the normal way of hardware support under linux, but on the other side we also dont play like it would be normal in the proprietary world, and if possible we blame others for that.

If Microsoft do that, clients will say : Hey! AMD sux! (and will put a bad point to AMD)
If Ubuntu do that, users will say : Hey! Ubuntu sux! (and will put a bad point to Linux)

Linux distros do not have a huge market, so not a real financial weight in decision for AMD.

It is very sad but Canonical adapts and IMO did the right choice.

(PS : for Canonical bashers -> I use Opensuse, so no need to argue )

[Slartifartblast]

Already stopped

I wish AMD would stop giving me reasons to not buy their products.... It almost like they don't want my cold hard cash...

After they dumped HD 4xxx support so fast and do not even update their legacy driver to support later Xorg versions it was so long and thanks for all the buggy flgrx. Nouveau may be crap but at least the Nvidia blob is excellent and legacy drivers get Xorg support updates for a good amount of time.

I don't dislike AMD, I just dislike what they do.

[theghost]

I can understand Canonical's decision. They want to offer stability, even in non-LTS releases. I think the decision is wrong.
If you want real stability, users should go for Ubuntu 14.04.x.
In the past it were the releases between the LTS where they did bring in the new stuff on cost of instability. Seems like they changed their attitude a bit because of a lot of criticism about instability of the Non-LTS Releases.
Although I think a lot of problems are caused by Canonical's (and Debian's) update policy. If they would atleast of the latest stable open source graphic stack (Mesa + driver), users would suffer less problems when using the open source drivers. Instead they stick to an old point version and many users use Oibaf latest git and suffer regressions. This sucks and drives people away from the distribution, just because they want the latest stable graphic stack without using unstable packages.
They should just offer a PPA with latest stable mesa and driver stack, which also helps test driving everything and a lot of people would be happy.

Of course it's also a problem of AMD: "Oh look, they released a new XServer / kernel version and API has changed. Well, let's start to change our driver"
It's not that all this stuff is developed behind closed doors in secret...

[tjaalton]

I can understand Canonical's decision. They want to offer stability, even in non-LTS releases. I think the decision is wrong.
If you want real stability, users should go for Ubuntu 14.04.x.
In the past it were the releases between the LTS where they did bring in the new stuff on cost of instability. Seems like they changed their attitude a bit because of a lot of criticism about instability of the Non-LTS Releases.
Although I think a lot of problems are caused by Canonical's (and Debian's) update policy. If they would atleast of the latest stable open source graphic stack (Mesa + driver), users would suffer less problems when using the open source drivers. Instead they stick to an old point version and many users use Oibaf latest git and suffer regressions. This sucks and drives people away from the distribution, just because they want the latest stable graphic stack without using unstable packages.

There are backport stacks provided, install 'xserver-xorg-lts-foo'.. though 14.04 doesn't have any available atm because 14.10 isn't out yet. But for 12.04 you have these, and the point releases use them (.2 uses kernel&rest from 12.10, .5 from 14.04 and that's the last backport for 12.04)

[theghost]

though 14.04 doesn't have any available atm

Well that's the problem. As soon as 14.10 is available and the graphics stack is outdated. So backporting only brings outdated versions to the user.
Especially Steam users want the latest stable upstream version of the open source drivers.

@Tjaalton: No offense meant, but have you ever discussed a possibility to bring latest Mesa faster etc. to your users? I mean even Jessie is at 10.2.5 atm., and even that is outdated... What about offering a PPA with latest stable stuff? Users could use and test the graphic stack for you, before you backport it.

[blackiwid]

If Microsoft do that, clients will say : Hey! AMD sux! (and will put a bad point to AMD)
If Ubuntu do that, users will say : Hey! Ubuntu sux! (and will put a bad point to Linux)

Linux distros do not have a huge market, so not a real financial weight in decision for AMD.

It is very sad but Canonical adapts and IMO did the right choice.

Sorry thats stupid, either u play after the rules of the foss movement, then u support free software done u maybe as compromise dont remove some blob loaders but thats it. Even that is a arguabaly.

If u want to be a primary proprietary supporting os, u play on their field so the only one that can make the job of delivering the driver are the companies that make the blobs, the hardware vendors. And its totaly normal that companies release their drivers AFTER the OS is out, why must all hardware work on day 1 perfectly?

When a new windows version comes 90% of all printers and scanners dont work on day 1 (maybe its less percent but its many) so where is the big problem if the drivers come out a week later or so?

But its ok, but all should learn that when they want good access to upstream Ubuntu is the most horrific distro availible thats their price, and they cant blame AMD for that, they made that desition to priotarize a buggy unusable blob over a good experince for most other users.

[tjaalton]

Well that's the problem. As soon as 14.10 is available and the graphics stack is outdated. So backporting only brings outdated versions to the user.
Especially Steam users want the latest stable upstream version of the open source drivers.

Since you mention open source drivers; what exactly will be outdated?

- latest Mesa will still be 10.3.x
- 3.17 kernel should be out by then but it's trivial to install a mainline build if you really must have it
- DDX drivers are generally fairly uninteresting and some don't even have regular updates, but anyway;
- current release of xf86-video-ati is 7.4.0 from June by mlankhorst (who released 7.1.0, 7.2.0 too), 7.3.0 is from Jan'14
- intel might still be on 2.99.9xx and the releases have seen regressions every now and then so staying on the latest one could cause issues
- nouveau 1.0.10 was released Nov'13 (by mlankhorst), 1.0.11 last week, and plan is to have the new release in 14.10

As for the updates ppa; go for it, noone's stopping you!

[tjaalton]

As for the updates ppa; go for it, noone's stopping you!

I mean, everyone is free to backport the devel series packages to the LTS via a ppa, it's not that hard. And we tend to get enough testing by the users of that devel series.. so when the backports are done Mesa for instance is already on some point-release that should fix the worst bugs.

[BoTuLoX]

have you tried arch? i mean there are certain bugs WIP in upstream for radeonsi stability but with arch none of my radeonsi system exposes it.

Cape Verde 7770 is rock solid
Kabini AM1 sempron is rock solid
Celeron lapton with 8XXX additional GPU from lenovo is rock solid and suspend perfectly
4850X2 with r600g is just peachy

so either i have every system not affected by this bug or Ubuntu introduces a patch somewhere along the chain that triggers it more often.

Note: i use chromium 37 pepper flash from AUR and removed old linux npapi plugin entirely since is buggy, unstable and slow + now several sites claim is too old, so maybe this crashes come from that PoS software??

Having owned Trinity desktop APUs, and currently owning a Trinity laptop, I can say:
Trinity mobile APUs are amazing on open source drivers. Suspend/resume works fine, they're very fast, VDPAU works, etc. The problem is your distro.

I am using Arch. I'm using an AMD A8-4500M (the GPU identifies as a Radeon HD 7640G). Suspend doesn't work, 3D and 2D performance is unacceptable for anything beyond desktop work (e.g. L4D2 is unplayable, Awesomenauts has random stutter). This is the third time I've tried the open source drivers (first time on Mint, last 2 times on Arch, 2 kernel versions apart with last time being a couple of weeks ago), and their state is absolutely horrendous for this GPU.

The problem is the drivers. And this is also the last time I buy anything with AMD on charge of my graphics.