AMD Radeon R9 290 On Linux
Due to bad experiences with the Catalyst Linux driver of the past or just wanting a fully open-source system, many Phoronix readers are interested in AMD Radeon hardware due to their open-source support. For the Radeon R9 290 there was open-source driver support published a few days after the launch. The open-source Radeon R9 290 series open-source Linux support is coming in the Linux 3.13 kernel and for the user-space components you need to basically be using the latest development code of libdrm, Mesa, xf86-video-ati, and LLVM. However, if getting and building all the latest open-source Radeon driver code, that isn't enough. AMD has disabled the open-source driver from using hardware acceleration by default for the Hawaii GPUs; you'll need to tweak your xorg.conf to enable acceleration.
AMD disabled 2D/3D/video hardware acceleration by default on the open-source driver for Hawaii GPUs until the code has stabilized. With the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer hardware, AMD is using GLAMOR for providing 2D acceleration over OpenGL, which is convenient but first then mandates a nicely working OpenGL driver before having 2D. AMD extended the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for the Hawaii GPU support, but still the RadeonSI driver for the HD 7000/8000 series GPUs isn't yet completely reliable. RadeonSI Gallium3D is improving but its performance and OpenGL support lag behind the Catalyst driver (obviously) and the open-source support is much better for the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series GPUs on the R600 Gallium3D driver.
Long story short, AMD is remaining committed to their open-source Linux graphics driver stack but if you're buying the Radeon R9 290 or 290X anytime soon, you will really be limited to using the Catalyst driver for any sane experience. By the time of distribution updates in H1'2014, hopefully the open-source Hawaii GPU experience will be decent enough for light gamers, but when the time comes on Phoronix we will have plenty of benchmarks.
Now let's see how the Radeon R9 290 is running under Linux with Catalyst and benchmarked in a ten-way configuration.