Linux support of AMD APU A8-7600

English Hardware
1

Hello,

I recently bought a brand new AMD APU A8-7600 (released in july), with integrated graphics Radeon R7. I wasn’t able to start or install openSUSE 13.1 with this APU, since it is not recognized by this “old” version. In fact, I it seems that Linux support for this APU is rather difficult at the moment.

If we want to install the AMD proprietary driver, the only one available is the Catalyst 14.6 Beta we can download on AMD website, released in july as well. But it’s rather heavy bugged, and above all it won’t work on openSUSE 13.2 since it doesn’t support a linux kernel > 3.13 (and openSUSE 13.2 will come with kernel 3.17). So, I guess that the fglrx package which will be available for openSUSE 13.2 will be either bugged (if based on Catalyst 14.6 Beta) or not convenient for latest APUs (if based on 14.4).

So, do you know anything about the free radeon driver which will be included in openSUSE 13.2 ?

  1. Does it offer a good support of the latest AMD APUs ?
  2. I heard that the free radeon drivers were now very close to the AMD proprietary driver, for performance as well as for features support (hardware acceleration / direct rendering, etc.). Do you think it’s possible to play recent games in decent conditions with it ?
  3. What about PlayOnLinux support with the free driver ? If we just install the mesa package(s), does it offer a complete OpenGL support ? So far I always got an error message (“Playonlinux can’t find OpenGL librairies”) if the proprietary drivers were not installed…

In fact, to be clear, can I hope a good Linux support for my hardware in the next months, or should I rather buy a little (and “old”) video card in order to avoid any problem ?

Thanks :wink:

2

The installation should work if you add “nomodeset” to the boot options, or press F4 and select “No KMS” at the installation mediums boot menu (if not using UEFI).

If we want to install the AMD proprietary driver, the only one available is the Catalyst 14.6 Beta we can download on AMD website, released in july as well. But it’s rather heavy bugged, and above all it won’t work on openSUSE 13.2 since it doesn’t support a linux kernel > 3.13 (and openSUSE 13.2 will come with kernel 3.17). So, I guess that the fglrx package which will be available for openSUSE 13.2 will be either bugged (if based on Catalyst 14.6 Beta) or not convenient for latest APUs (if based on 14.4).

The openSUSE fglrx packages (and Sebastian Siebert’s installation script, on which those packages are based) contain patches for newer kernels.
See here: SDB:AMD fglrx - openSUSE Wiki

So, do you know anything about the free radeon driver which will be included in openSUSE 13.2 ?

Well, it is a quite recent version.

  1. Does it offer a good support of the latest AMD APUs ?

No idea.
But as your APU is based on R7, it should be supported I suppose.

  1. I heard that the free radeon drivers were now very close to the AMD proprietary driver, for performance as well as for features support (hardware acceleration / direct rendering, etc.). Do you think it’s possible to play recent games in decent conditions with it ?

Yes.
Although it might probably depend on your specific model.

  1. What about PlayOnLinux support with the free driver ? If we just install the mesa package(s), does it offer a complete OpenGL support ? So far I always got an error message (“Playonlinux can’t find OpenGL librairies”) if the proprietary drivers were not installed…

Of course Mesa provides complete OpenGL support.

Probably you started a 32bit software on a 64bit system, but didn’t have the 32bit Mesa packages installed? (Mesa-libGL1-32bit in particular)
The proprietary drivers do contain the 32bit libraries in the 64bit package, so they are available in any case if you install the proprietary driver.

In fact, to be clear, can I hope a good Linux support for my hardware in the next months, or should I rather buy a little (and “old”) video card in order to avoid any problem ?

You could try a Factory/13.2Beta LiveCD to see how well your hardware is supported:
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/13.2-Beta1/iso/

3

Hello and many thanks for your very complete and useful (and reassuring) answer ! :slight_smile:

I tried this before, and I could indeed install openSUSE 13.1. But then I came on a black screen on first boot… A8-7600 is clearly not OK for openSUSE 13.1.
There is probably something more complicated to do because it works fine with Mageia 4 (which uses the same kernel version, I think), but I didn’t find what.

Anyway, I’m waiting for openSUSE 13.2 and now I’m sure that everything will be OK ! I will try Beta 13.2, indeed.

Thanks !

4

Well, probably the “nomodeset” (to prevent the radeon driver from being used) wasn’t carried over to the installed system.
You could add it manually, or try to boot to “recovery mode” instead (“Advanced Options” in the boot menu).

There is probably something more complicated to do because it works fine with Mageia 4 (which uses the same kernel version, I think), but I didn’t find what.

According to https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_4_Release_Notes#Base_system , Mageia 4 ships with Kernel 3.12.8 whereas openSUSE 13.1 has 3.11.6 (with updates 3.11.10). So definitely not the same kernel version… :wink:

Anyway, I’m waiting for openSUSE 13.2 and now I’m sure that everything will be OK ! I will try Beta 13.2, indeed.

It’s always a good idea to try it on your hardware first, yes, especially if the hardware is quite new.
If you do find problems, you could/should also file bug reports. Maybe they could still get fixed until the final release.

5

I’ll definitely do it ! If I can help my favourite Linux distribution… :wink:

I’ll try a Gnome Live CD of openSUSE 13.2 and I’ll tell you if everything works. Thanks !

6

Just for the record (and for other Kaveri owners!), everything works fine out of the box with openSUSE 13.2 beta1!

In order to test the free radeon driver on my APU, I ran some benchmarks with gputest. An example here: http://www.ozone3d.net/gpudb/scores-geeks3d-gputest.php?bid=1010
The results are quite satisfactory, since I got scores only 4 to 10 times lower than power-users with big GPUs/CPUs who use proprietary drivers with Windows 7 x64.

Maybe I should run the same benchmarks on Windows to compare the scores, but I find that the result is quite decent with such a recent hardware! So, an A8-7600 seems now to be a good choice for Linux.