Odyssey with AMD part1

I have spent all of Saturday and yesterday Sunday configuring the PC and testing various things and GNU / Linux distributions.

Like all AMD graphics users, I suppose you already know that a few months ago the support for GPU acceleration of the h264, mpeg etc has been released, through vdpau and that also for Kernel 3.11 the dynamic power management (dpm), which will finally make the graphics look fresh with the free driver.

I got ready to get off Kubuntu 13.10 Alpha 2, I updated, I installed the PPA of Xorg edgers and I could finally play some Steam games, also much faster than with the closed driver.

I installed the Kernel 3.11 rc3, and I activated the DPM (dynamic power management) and everything worked correctly, until from time to time the pc began to turn off the screen for about 5 seconds and then it returned, until there it was quiet.

The problem came later, the PC directly began to reboot ..., there I already started to worry, so I installed Kubuntu 13.04 and left with Kernel 3.10.

Since until Kernel 3,11 the dpm cannot be activated, I tried to activate vdpau in the free driver, I compiled a table with the corresponding flags, I installed the vdpau packages and nothing, it did not work.

I gave up and decided to wait, but something strange happened, suddenly when I restarted the PC, I began to receive Kernel Panics, I entered Kubuntu and Kernel panic, I entered some other distro with a live usb and Kernel panic, I was about to install Windows to see if the motherboard had been burned or something had broken.

4 hours after the Kernel panics it occurred to me to return it to factory settings, disable xboost and update it to a new version. Finally the Kernel panics disappeared (thanks Athena for helping me XD).

Finally, I decided to try again to configure vdpau in Kubuntu, I opened some threads in Phoronix, I asked Michael himself (who did not answer xD), I asked in Phoronix's irc, I followed the instructions and nothing, it did not work.

So I started looking for a current distro that had almost the latest and came across Fedora 19. I said to myself, let's give it a try, it was since version 16 that I hadn't even downloaded it. I downloaded the version KDE, I updated everything and came across a post from my blocker friend Xenode System which allowed me to configure the distro to suit me.

It is here that looking at the packages, I found table-vdpau-drivers. I thought it was the acceleration package for shaders, but once installed I realize that it also had h264 acceleration, I tried with Mplayer and Flash and I realize that Mplayer is consuming only 1%, so problem solved.

Now to wait for Kernel 3.11 that will probably be in a short time Fedora And by the way I recommend giving this distro a try, this version did not seem bad like the previous one :).

fed1cap

Part 2 will come when Kernel 3.11 comes out.


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  1.   JC3 said

    Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but I understand that installing mesa-vdpau-drivers solves the temperature problems that the free drivers for ati graphics have. I agree with you, Fedora 19 KDE works very well, I installed it after some problems with Chakra and I am really happy.

    1.    pandev92 said

      No! The temperature problems are fixed when kernel 3.11 will arrive by putting the parameter radeon.dpm = 1 in the grub.
      The table vdpau drivers activates the acceleration h264 by gpu, as if it were an nvidia card 😛

  2.   Garbage_Killer said

    Even though I don't use amd for now, it is good to know your headaches, in case in the future I build a pc with pure amd.

  3.   davidlg said

    Ok, I'll keep that in mind since I want to build a pc

  4.   3 said

    'I installed the Kernel 3.11 rc3, and I activated the DPM (dynamic power management) and everything worked correctly, until from time to time the pc started to turn off the screen for about 5 seconds and then it came back, until there it was quiet.'

    How did you activate the dpm?
    if it worked the first time you should have looked at the fountain or fans

    do tutorials on how you are doing what you get
    details commands, procedures

  5.   msx said

    How did you find the F18 bad?

    1.    pandev92 said

      As simple as every two by three there was something that crashed, that if rhythmbox, that if firefox hung that if the happy notifications of errors appeared etc. I tested it the same month of departure.

  6.   Ben said

    Well, it seems good to me that he expresses without qualms his problems that he has had with AMD. Until several say that the amd drivers work as well as the intel in linux (which are open) I will not consider a laptop with an amd processor.

    1.    maximi89 said

      But if the problem is not with the CPUs, it is with the GPUs ... the biggest problem is obtaining good performance from OpenGL and obviously that the system does not heat up demanding a lot and yielding little, as far as I have had problems with AMD it has always been hot ! xd
      On the other hand, the times that I have had Intel it has worked well, but only doing light things, where I realized these results was with LibreOffice that with AMD and using Debian it worked slow and bad, when I changed to LinuxMint 14, it became much better in performance, moving text and doing things that with the other (Debian) was impossible ...

    2.    giskard said

      But the Intel are at the height of the AMD or NVidia? That is, the hardware. I ask why maybe I renew my equipment (which is more than 12 years old) and every piece of information helps.

      1.    pandev92 said

        No, at the nvidia level not even close, that's why intel + nvidia graphics processor. Now if we compare the support of intel with that of amd ...

  7.   Jesus Israel Perales Martinez said

    Tell me that your graphics card is an HD 4xxxx (I don't know how many x are xD) I use fedora and that of heating with flash no more: Yes, what I did was copy the url and play them in vlc xD, the temperature rose less much less D:

    1.    pandev92 said

      In this pc it is an apu 7650d, in the laptop if it is a radeon 4xxx xD and it reaches 90 degrees ahaha, I bought a fan just for the lap! in summer the cool lap and me sweating like a pig xd

  8.   eliotime3000 said

    For something I was surprised why Ubuntu was slowing down on AMD mainboards, and it said "AMD Drive Not Supported".

    Good thing I use Intel on my Debian PC.

  9.   Commentator said

    Let me see if I get it right.
    From Kernel 3.10 onwards, is the problem of high temperatures in ATI 4.xxxx video cards solved with the free driver?
    I appreciate the answer in advance.

    Greetings.

  10.   Ernesto Manriquez said

    I walked through Fedora because I wanted to try the DPM system and it has worked amazing. Some tips.

    1. Never, but never install Fedora without Fedora Utils. Find it, download it, press Next, Next and Next, and you will have everything ready.

    2. To get DPM correctly I recommend you activate updates-testing and go to this repository:

    http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/rawhide-kernel-nodebug/

    There you will find the latest Rawhide kernel 3.11, with no debugging symbols to keep it fast. They update it every 3 or 4 days as arrangements come out. The rest of how to get DPM up (which is basically putting radeon.dpm = 1 on the grub line) you'll find in a lot of howtos out there.

    3. DPM is not magic. Anyway, I don't run DotA at a quarter of the speed of Windows, but something is something. The biggest improvements come from Llano, Trinity and Bobcat APUs. If you have a Radeon HD 7800 and up, forget about Fedora and use Catalyst with Chakra.

    4. If you are going to run KDE, with free Radeon and DPM drivers, then it is time for you to use a trick that only works with KDE and free Radeon (or Intel) drivers. In console, edit the .bashrc file and put the following.

    export LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME = vdpau
    export VDPAU_DRIVER = r600
    export R600_DEBUG = sb
    export KWIN_OPENGL_WS = egl

    These beauties do various things.
    a) The first two make the VDPAU layer work, to watch HD videos without CPU expense. Perfect, especially, for the C and E series APUs (which by the way, they work like a charm with DPM)
    b) The third activates experimental optimizations in the shadow compiler. This new code can increase performance in intensive 25D programs and games by up to 3%.
    c) The fourth activates the experimental EGL backend for KWin. This option, which only works in free drivers, makes KWin use much less CPU, maintaining the same fluidity.

    1.    Ernesto Manriquez said

      The numbers in Phoronix, on an AMD E-350. The first column is Ubuntu 13.04 stock (before), the second is Catalyst, and the last is the free driver with all updates, DPM, and the experimental shadowing code.

      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_fusion_dpmsb&num=1

    2.    pandev92 said

      I'm going to wait for the 3.11 kernel to stabilize and then I'll try the free drivers again! I write your tips in evernote! Thank you.

  11.   xavitokun said

    Good…

    I have a computer with an amd athlon2 x3 cpu and an amd radeon HD 5750 and I have always given up using GNU / Linux because the drivers always fail, or the whole system crashes or the games do not really look good or fluent.

    Could someone help me with any suggestions and tutorials?

    Thank you.

  12.   Germaine said

    Well, I have not suffered from any similar problem; I have Kubuntu 13.10 64 installed and it works very well, I wanted to install Fedora 19 but the graphical part did not work for me to install this distribution, which is the only one that I need to test, so as I am already landing only with Kubuntu.

  13.   Jose Jácome said

    Typical journey for those of us who are AMD Users (and more tragic for Interchangeable Graphics Users like me 🙁), but the good thing about this is that we can keep trying ... For my part, I still don't have high expectations regarding AMD graphics but I hope that MIR and Wayland together with Kernel 3.11 give us at least some hope !!!

  14.   pandev92 said

    Nothing to do, I had to go back to catalyst, the free driver simply and simply causes me unpredictable reboots of the pc .., I think it must be due to overheating but of course the lm sensors does not show me the temperature of the apu .., well I could not tell…

  15.   deviltrol said

    "So I started looking for a current distro that had almost the latest and came across Fedora 19. I said to myself, let's give it a try, it was since version 16 that I hadn't even downloaded it."
    ....
    «…. this version did not seem bad to me like the previous one »

    If you yourself admit that you did not download it since version 16, how can you ensure that the previous one was bad? Do you speak for yourself, or just hearsay?

    1.    pandev92 said

      I forgot to put that if I tried version 18 on live usb.

  16.   ChepeV said

    Great, I was just deciding which distro to install on the desktop pc that is all AMD 😀

  17.   tito said

    I have AMD E-450 and I have Sabayon 64 KDE installed, it has already been the distro with the best performance in terms of functionality.

  18.   moony said

    Che, I don't know ... it seems to me that due to a graphical problem, going from distro to distro ..
    Imagine that in fedora you can have a mess similar to kubuntu 13.04 in future versions. So what are you going to do? switch to kubuntu again? .. Cheers.

    1.    pandev92 said

      Well, I don't know, right now I can't even use linux, the pc is restarted every 2 or 3 hours, alone ... we'll see ...

  19.   FreeBSDDICK. said

    Kde and fedora are bitches and bitches xd

    1.    pandev92 said

      freebsddick is a nasty xD

  20.   gorlok said

    Interesting, I'll keep that in mind. Personally, I use Ubuntu 12.04 for my teams, with Unity and a dock, and mostly Gnome applications. But it is good to know. Good date.

  21.   Yuriy Istochnikov said

    It's something weird; because to me, comrade Pandev, it happened the other way around.

    The specifications of my computer are these:
    "Velikaya Slava"
    -HP Envy M6-1105dx
    -AMD APU A10-4600M & 6 GB RAM. The rest need not be described.

    When I installed Fedora 19 on it, that quickie thing boiled over. I couldn't install it without a base with 3 fans and in console mode (I'm not kidding); while Kubuntu 13.10, it did not cause any shock. In fact, with the free driver it behaved VERY similar to Winbugs 8.1 and with Catalyst it behaves BETTER than with Winbugs 8.1. In fact, in idle it is 10 ° C lower than when it was with Windows. I play Kerbal (a very inefficient game in multicore handling) on ​​Wine and it rises to just 70-75 ° C.

    Of the things I know:
    -This laptop's heatsink is literally poop. It's made of aluminum and it doesn't dissipate a shit.
    -I would like to have a way to have the fan full so that even if I use more batteries, I can have my Velikaya Slava cooler than lettuce (without having a base with 5 fans below).
    -This thing is in dire need of a thermal paste change; I just bought a tube of Gelid GC-Extreme, which is the one recommended by Tom's Hardware for this type of problem.
    -Let's hope that Fedora 20 comes with a kernel with Radeon DPM activatable (19 won't let me update a damn no-boil; '(and at least "ERROR 090D; Your system had a thermal shutdown").

  22.   Alan Enrique Lopez Mata said

    I have an RX 570 graphics card, install ubuntu and all of a sudden the image freezes and then goes blank. Do you think that installing Fedora fixes that or it would be exactly the same?