The highly anticipated update to the Linux Kernel has officially arrived, and the hard working kernel developers have been busy.
For a complete list of whats new, the first changelog Google offered me was courtesy of kernel newbies (http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.5).
Of course the update that is most interesting to us, is the addition of experimental support for Powerplay in the amdgpu driver. Powerplay is the brand name for the power management technologies found in AMD CPUs and APUs, which requires the dreaded and deprecated Catalyst driver to work properly.
A lot of performance issues with the amdgpu driver prior to this update are due to the GPU starting in low power/performance mode. So if you are using the open source drivers and have a newer GCN 1.2+ graphics card (GPUs Tonga and Fiji, APUs Carrizo and Stoney), then you might want to consider upgrading.
If you are going to upgrade your kernel then you will need to manually enable the powerplay support, as it is switched off by default at the moment:
Personally I am going to wait for the next iteration of my distro, Fedora 24 will be making an appearance soon with Linux 4.5. Canonical are also back porting code from 4.5 into 4.4, which will ship with Ubuntu 16.04 to give the best experience to AMD users who will now be using the open source drivers, since it was announced they could not support fglrx anymore.
Hopefully we will start seeing similar compatibility for older chipsets in the coming months as amdgpu progresses further.
Sources:
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.5
http://news.softpedia.com/news/linux-kernel-4-5-officially-released-adds-high-performance-to-the-amdgpu-driver-501689.shtml Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
For a complete list of whats new, the first changelog Google offered me was courtesy of kernel newbies (http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.5).
Of course the update that is most interesting to us, is the addition of experimental support for Powerplay in the amdgpu driver. Powerplay is the brand name for the power management technologies found in AMD CPUs and APUs, which requires the dreaded and deprecated Catalyst driver to work properly.
A lot of performance issues with the amdgpu driver prior to this update are due to the GPU starting in low power/performance mode. So if you are using the open source drivers and have a newer GCN 1.2+ graphics card (GPUs Tonga and Fiji, APUs Carrizo and Stoney), then you might want to consider upgrading.
If you are going to upgrade your kernel then you will need to manually enable the powerplay support, as it is switched off by default at the moment:
QuotePowerplay support is not enabled by default for all kind of hardware supported in this release due to stability concerns; in these cases the use of Powerplay can be forced with the "amdgpu.powerplay=1" kernel option.
Personally I am going to wait for the next iteration of my distro, Fedora 24 will be making an appearance soon with Linux 4.5. Canonical are also back porting code from 4.5 into 4.4, which will ship with Ubuntu 16.04 to give the best experience to AMD users who will now be using the open source drivers, since it was announced they could not support fglrx anymore.
Hopefully we will start seeing similar compatibility for older chipsets in the coming months as amdgpu progresses further.
Sources:
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.5
http://news.softpedia.com/news/linux-kernel-4-5-officially-released-adds-high-performance-to-the-amdgpu-driver-501689.shtml Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Oh sweet ^^ I wonder if it will work better with ps3 controllers. My laptop did not like it at all, and poking about on Google suggested it to be a kernel problem.
I did wonder when that was going to finally be put in.
Written from Ubuntu Phone, and greetings from germany.
Last edited by kuro on 15 March 2016 at 12:06 pm UTC
Just noticed it also introduced a new xpad bug...
Two steps forward and one step back!