I have an AMD APU A8-7600 and my linux machine sux?

[yro84]

I would like to have some sort of help here.

I have the apu a8-7600 and I dont know how to get the best of it on linux. Is that any kind of driver (proprietary or open) that I could use on it to get the best of it?

On *buntus 16.04.x I get the stock mesa and the apu just sux on linux. The same on Manjaro (latest) with latest mesa and kernel... What am i doing wrong here?

Some help please?

[bridgman]

OK, so IIRC the a8-7600 is a Kaveri with full CPU and 6 of 8 GPU compute units. Open source driver is probably the best official support but either driver should work OK.

The GPU independent code in the open drivers has been improving fairly rapidly over the last year or so - using Manjaro as an example, can you provide a few more details re: what "the APU just sux on Linux" means ? Application, distro, drivers, observed behavior, expected behaviour.

Please also post the output of "glxinfo | grep render". You might have to install a package for Mesa utilities.

[dungeon]

You have 4 drivers possibilities for that APU - fglrx, radeon, amdgpu-pro and amdgpu drivers. radeon is default driver.

All drivers are fine for general usability and on slighlty different points, well if you don't expect Windows performance in *all* games.

As bridgman said, it was not clear what sucks for you there? DE, some apps, games... or driver does not work for you?

[yro84]

OK, so IIRC the a8-7600 is a Kaveri with full CPU and 6 of 8 GPU compute units. Open source driver is probably the best official support but either driver should work OK.

The GPU independent code in the open drivers has been improving fairly rapidly over the last year or so - using Manjaro as an example, can you provide a few more details re: what "the APU just sux on Linux" means ? Application, distro, drivers, observed behavior, expected behaviour.

Please also post the output of "glxinfo | grep render". You might have to install a package for Mesa utilities.

oh, sorry the lack of infos...

its 00:50 here and im still working. tomorrow ill complement this post with more infos. but ill not be able to post linux results as im running win at work and will not be able to get the infos at home.. just to start it, running manjaro or buntus in unity 7, kde, gnome, mate, budgie AND xfce i see the same behaviour: i "feel" nags on clicking menus, file managers, and when dealing with multiple tabs openned. and im not talking about gaming. in fact, i dont care about gaming on linux. i just wanted to have my computer running linux, using my computer power at the maximum and without nags, hangs and some glitches. i have 8gb ddr3 ram at 1600 and i make it to be 2 gb on this ram to the apu-gpu. hd 1 tera sata3, psu coolermaster at 350. all runing great with windows 7 and 10. lots of nags with manjaro and buntus running latest kernel + latest mesa (stocks).

edit.: before i get into work again.. one thing thats funny here, when running any of these distros from usb stick (live) i have the feeling that the os run better than when i install on hdd..

[dungeon]

just to start it, running manjaro or buntus in unity 7, kde, gnome, mate, budgie AND xfce i see the same behaviour: i "feel" nags on clicking menus, file managers, and when dealing with multiple tabs openned.

Well, that might be but also might not be GPU driver problem... that HDD migth be problem if it has slow acces time or some file system problem, etc...

USB2/3 drives have that slow, but SATA and especially version 3 shoudn't that much... is a HDD internal 3.5" or mobile 2.5" variant, these later can be slow.

Just look at logs, dmesg and Xorg.0.log... maybe something would happen obvious there if it is a bug. Any overclocked component maybe? Certain subsystems might misbehave when OC is there, etc...

Did you tried CPU frequency scaling governior to set on performance, if default is ondemand you might see same stalls bacause of that.

[dungeon]

How to use a rollign release os, latest mesa and a custom kernel, see (enable CIK support in amdgpu kernel driver ) :
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...in-living-room

Why don't you stop just spamming with these links, that is not an answer for everything No one asked how to use trolling release os, patest mresa, and mustom kurnol with enalbled BIK trollort in shittiest driver ever

You know how it goes people will switch to nvidia or whatever else, just because of great amount of trollism around opencurse AMD.. Fuck off

[yro84]

Well, that might be but also might not be GPU driver problem... that HDD migth be problem if it has slow acces time or some file system problem, etc...

USB2/3 drives have that slow, but SATA and especially version 3 shoudn't that much... is a HDD internal 3.5" or mobile 2.5" variant, these later can be slow.

Just look at logs, dmesg and Xorg.0.log... maybe something would happen obvious there if it is a bug. Any overclocked component maybe? Certain subsystems might misbehave when OC is there, etc...

Did you tried CPU frequency scaling governior to set on performance, if default is ondemand you might see same stalls bacause of that.

No problems on HDD side. Hitachi 64mb cache 1tera sata 3.5 standard @ 7200rpm. CPU freq not touched. All default.

Im grateful of you guys trying to help but nevermind. Linux is not ok, yet, for me on AMD hardware. Ill stick with manjaro to make some tests now and them, but main os will still be windows 7.

Hope kernel lts 4.9 + latest mesa will improve things up on the mid of this year..

[duby229]

No problems on HDD side. Hitachi 64mb cache 1tera sata 3.5 standard @ 7200rpm. CPU freq not touched. All default.

Im grateful of you guys trying to help but nevermind. Linux is not ok, yet, for me on AMD hardware. Ill stick with manjaro to make some tests now and them, but main os will still be windows 7.

Hope kernel lts 4.9 + latest mesa will improve things up on the mid of this year..

You didn't post enough information to know, but it sure does sound more like a disk latency problem. It could be a problem with the SATA controller configuration or even a SATA cable with a slight short in it. I would check the BIOS configuration to see if the SATA controller is configured as IDE or AHCI. The way the SATA controller behaves is dependant on that option and will perform better if it's in AHCI mode.

EDIT: Ultimately you probably want to upgrade to an SSD even if you stick with Windows. Latency is much lower. See Linux is different from Windows in the fact that it tries real hard -not- to thrash the drives, but in essence in makes Linux less sensitive to bandwidth and much more sensitive to latency, where-as Windows is less sensitive to latency and more to bandwidth. SSD's are great for both because they have less latency and more bandwidth.

[dungeon]

No problems on HDD side. Hitachi 64mb cache 1tera sata 3.5 standard @ 7200rpm.

Well, this your comment indicate that it has something to do with HDD:

edit.: before i get into work again.. one thing thats funny here, when running any of these distros from usb stick (live) i have the feeling that the os run better than when i install on hdd..

So if issue doesn't appear when run from usb flash drive, but appear once installed on sata hdd drive... it is reasonable to think issue is with either hdd or sybsytem hdd run upon, so sata bug, not ideal confugured something for your hdd, filesystem bug, etc... maybe also something in bios misconfigured as duby229 said... but generaly you should inspect things around hdd here instead of GPU driver.

Altough it is possible to be GPU driver bug also But you didn't said with which apps exactly that appear, are they all uses same GUI toolkit for example if for example only happen with certain apps let say gtk3 apps but not with gtk2 or qt5 then it might be GPU driver slowingdown something.
There are slower and faster gtk3 themes for example, etc... so it might be just theme issue as newer gnome often break old themes, so you might get slowdown because of incompatable or not well optimized theme or something

And why not to mention to be aware that particulary when distro rolls various new shits might happen, in comparison to mentioned Windows 7 which is year 2009. or before thing that does not really roll

[bridgman]

IIRC people were also getting good results with "ondemand" by tweaking a couple of the thresholds, particularly reducing the CPU load required to start raising clocks.