AMD Wants To Know What's Wrong With Catalyst

[soulsource]

In my opinion, they could simply drop fglrx and focus on the open source drivers. Those might atm have inferior performance and OpenCL is still work in progress, yet they are quite a bit more stable, integrate with the rest of the linux desktop and (what's really important for me) give superior font rendering (although I have no clue why...).
Fglrx on the other hand might run faster and run more (but also by far not all) OpenCL kernels, but it crashes regularly, it requires X11 restarts for the most stupid things like switching off the secondary screen, it requires the use of either Cataclyst Control Center of atisetup to enable/disable monitors,... In short, it's pretty useless unless the only thing you are doing with your computer is playing games or cryptocurrency mining...

[flim]

In my opinion, they could simply drop fglrx and focus on the open source drivers. Those might atm have inferior performance and OpenCL is still work in progress, yet they are quite a bit more stable, integrate with the rest of the linux desktop and (what's really important for me) give superior font rendering (although I have no clue why...).
Fglrx on the other hand might run faster and run more (but also by far not all) OpenCL kernels, but it crashes regularly, it requires X11 restarts for the most stupid things like switching off the secondary screen, it requires the use of either Cataclyst Control Center of atisetup to enable/disable monitors,... In short, it's pretty useless unless the only thing you are doing with your computer is playing games or cryptocurrency mining...

$ xrandr --output MONITOR --off

No restart or Catalyst Control Center required.

[boffo]

As someone said, AMD could be taking advantage of Linux, but instead, they have been leaving it aside.



APU owner, right?

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42960#c15

it should be fixed in the next release of kernel 3.15+
there is a new, apparently unrelated bug, though... you have to turn the display off and on with something like

xrandr --output LVDS --off && xrandr --output LVDS --auto

after resuming from suspend.

This is why I prefer open source, at least you know (kind of) what's going on/how to fix or work around bugs. Their "unofficial" bug tracker ( http://ati.cchtml.com/ ) is a mess, devs rarely reply and things rarely get fixed... meanwhile, OSS devs are always happy to help you.

Yes I own an Apu A8. I tried

xrandr --output LVDS --off && xrandr --output LVDS --auto

the quirks and the other solutions in

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42960#c15

but it didn't work.
Also I have found another problem (I forgot about it), sometimes the external vga monitor doesn't get the signal, even if I don't suspend/resume. In that case i need to turn off and on the secondary monitor with xrandr or with kscreen. It might be a synchronization problem (?), because it's random, sometimes it just works sometimes it doesn't.

[Guest]

In my opinion, they could simply drop fglrx and focus on the open source drivers. Those might atm have inferior performance and OpenCL is still work in progress, yet they are quite a bit more stable

I've had little stability issues with fglrx on my 7850. Desktop usage, video playback, and most games were fine. Only exception were some games I ran through Wine which acted a bit strangely with crashes.

Was a time recently on the open-source drivers where anything using VDPAU would just hard-lock the system. This was around the same time I felt like messing with my media collection too. Would be quite a drag double-clicking some video expecting it to work, then realizing my error when it's too late. This was fixed at some point a few days later, but back when I still had my 7850, it was still quite unstable. I'm talking GPU restarts and eventually hard-locks from doing simple tasks like web browsing and viewing pictures. fglrx as far as I'm concerned is more stable.

From my general understanding though, older kernels (3.14 specifically) was more stable than later kernels. No idea if this is the case still (last kernel I tried was 3.17rc1 which still had the unstable graphics).

Even on my 7660G + 7670M laptop fglrx wasn't too bad; only issues were with Chrome wanting to not maximize properly, and Dota 2 having some unstable FPS (going from around 50-60 down to 15 repeatedly). Open-source drivers weren't bad at all on it either though (Dota 2 instead of having unstable FPS just has low FPS), so I can actually use either driver.