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by michaelt
3516 days ago
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My employer took took a shipment of fifteen Dell computers a few months ago - with ATI Radeon HD 8570 graphics cards (3 years old, with DP 1.2 and 4k support so not obsolete by any means, and certified for Ubuntu 14.04 [1]) Then Ubuntu 16.04 comes out, and guess what? No fglrx driver support any more [2] and users report the open source drivers use about a core and a half worth of CPU, slowing down their entire machines. Apparently our only options are to buy new cards or stay on 14.04 indefinitely. Meanwhile, I had an nVidia card and I was able to upgrade to 16.04 with no problems at all. This week you might have resolved not to buy from nVidia - but in the same week I've resolved not to buy from ATI. [1] https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201302-12679/
[2] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalyst... |
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Ubuntu 16.04 does ship with a pretty old version of Mesa (full major version behind, about to be 2 major verions as Mesa 13 is in the RC stage) which probably isn't helping matters. Unfortunately, while there are some PPAs that make it fairly easy to install a bleeding edge build, there's not really a convenient way to install the latest stable release.
For some context, the reason fglrx/Catalyst has not been updated is due to an in progress driver transition for AMD cards on Linux. Generally speaking, Linux video drivers are split into a kernel part and a user space part. For quite some time, AMD has maintained two completely separate driver stacks on Linux. For the user space side, this didn't represent a huge amount of duplication of effort as most of the code is shared with the OpenGL portion of their Windows driver, but for the kernel side it was a bunch of wasted effort. A while back, they started on a new open source kernel driver, called amdgpu, that could provide the necessary facilities for both their open source and proprietary driver efforts. The new proprietary driver (AMDGPU-Pro) targets this kernel module. Unfortunately, amdgpu does not have production-ready support for GCN 1.0 GPUs like the 8570. This will get fixed eventually, but that doesn't really help you now.