Shockingly, there was not as much homework tonight - I had a bonus half hour! To take a break before going from schoolwork to homework, I decided to research a way to get my dead desktop working. I do not usually have time to do things other than schoolwork, but when I do, I like to work on my computers - creating code and fixing them. One of the main problems I have with my desktop is with the graphics drivers - which I have been battling ever since I finished building it. Surprisingly, I have managed to make them function in the past. They just break shortly afterwards, usually because I create an unsolvable dependency conflict which inspires the computer try to uninstall everything. Then I have to reinstall the OS . . . and the drivers are broken again. Each time this happens the old fix does not work anymore. VERY frustrating!
I decided that my focus today was to figure out a way to run games on my gaming desktop again. In its current state, my desktop does not have graphics at all - just plain old text terminals. If I want to play 3D games, it at least needs to be able to display them on the screen. In order to do this, I quickly realized that I was going to need to set up graphics acceleration - which meant getting one of the two drivers, which usually don't work, to work. That was until . . . I discovered there was a third driver.
Many people with AMD graphics on their Linux system may have painful memories of trying to get graphics acceleration to work, myself included. This has been a significant hurdle for users who want to use an AMD card. However, this may all be about to change. AMD recently released a new driver, rather plainly and simply termed AMDGPU. Their new driver is taking AMD graphics support in a different direction. Rather than using all open source or all closed source, this driver is based on the open source driver, but also contains closed source components that run features which do not work in the open source driver. This is exciting, because people who tested the new driver have had spectacular results. Also, AMD is hoping to open source as much of their code as possible.
Hopefully this means that there will be stable drivers for AMD systems. A test by Phoronix (system testing website) shows that AMDGPU it has the capability of being even faster than DRM (Direct Rendering Manager - not Digital Restrictions Management). AMDGPU is not as reliable as Catalyst, but it may be more reliable later on than the current drivers. This new driver is available in Debian Sid & Stretch, and can be installed as "xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu" (aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu). It comes with Vulkan support. The driver is also available in the repos for Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, and openSUSE.
I will try it out soon and report back.
Good luck AMD users!
#slice2016
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