Ubuntu Drops Support For AMD's Catalyst GPU Driver

[steven36]

Ubuntu developers have deprecated the fglrx / Catalyst Linux display stack for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Users of this upcoming Ubuntu release are now encouraged to use the open-source Radeon display stack.

 

The tentative 16.04 release notes mention, "The fglrx driver is now deprecated in 16.04, and we recommend its open source alternatives (radeon and amdgpu). AMD put a lot of work into the drivers, and we backported kernel code from Linux 4.5 to provide a better experience. When upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 from a previous release, both the fglrx driver and the xorg.conf will be removed, so that the system is set to use either the amdgpu driver or the radeon driver (depending on the available hardware)."

Canonical will not be supporting the fglrx/Catalyst Linux driver in their archive beginning with Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus. There's nothing stopping anyone from downloading the latest release from AMD.com and installing the driver directly or generating the Debian packages from that -- assuming upstream Linux kernel and xorg-server compatibility -- but it's not being supported by upstream Ubuntu.

For most users, the open-source Radeon graphics stack is "good enough" particularly if you just care about desktop use-cases, video playback, and light gaming. However, currently the open-source Radeon Linux graphics stack only supports OpenGL 4.1 rather than OpenGL 4.5, the open-source OpenCL compute stack leaves a lot to be desired, and there are other current open-source AMD driver limitations that for some users will make switching to the open-source driver a regression in experience and performance.

The NVIDIA Linux driver will remain in place for Ubuntu 16.04. The news of Ubuntu deprecating fglrx/Catalyst isn't entirely a big surprise since around the middle of the year is when AMD is expected to roll out their new Catalyst Linux driver based on the AMDGPU kernel driver. There, however, that support is still expected to be limited to GCN 1.2+ GPUs at least initially so it won't be of any relevance to the vast majority of AMD Linux customers at the moment unless GCN 1.0~1.1 gets tidied up soon for AMDGPU.

 

TheSource

 

 

[edwardecl]

I don't understand the logic with this, I hope AMD makes an Ubuntu repository for their drivers, manual installs are a pain.

[steven36]

5 hours ago, edwardecl said:

I don't understand the logic with this, I hope AMD makes an Ubuntu repository for their drivers, manual installs are a pain.

The manger said this

Quote

For those who don't know, I manage AMD's open source graphics team. We (AMD) are focusing our Linux graphics driver development on the amdgpu based open source and upcoming hybrid stacks; consequently, we are not supporting fglrx on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Users who require Pro-graphics or Workstation class features and performance can continue to use fglrx on Ubuntu 14.04 until the hybrid stack is available later this year.

I dont how useful these new drivers they plain to make will be for older hardware but we will see 14.04 most flavors  and forks will get updates tell 2019 . I guess it time for me to explore new distros and get away from the newb distros like Ubuntu.    If you buy new hardware best to buy Intel they got some great open source drivers for it already . Or Nvidia they play nice with Linux now after  Linux Torvalds  flipped them the bird and embarrassed them.

 

I will test the AMD open source stack when 16.04 comes out of beta on my non production drive to see if there OK for me but i never like them before because better HW alteration makes things work better . Its going to be a bummer just like  when Ubuntu 15.10 1st  came out and the proprietary stack didn't work for AMD HW it seems . The proprietary stack  is still a fallback option for AMD  if there new Open source hybrid stacks dont work out.

 

AMD is the worse thing to buy for windows or linux  they have crappy support.