> My Asus Netbook no longer gets all the acceleration options that it used to have pre 16.04.
Which holds true, because /dev/radeon no longer offers hardware video decoding support it once did unless I force enable it, and even then it usually leads to random X crashes when watching videos.
And then there is this,
"For one, AMD users can’t use applications that require OpenGL 4.3 or later without the fglrx/Catalyst drivers."
OK, that calls out X.org as the reason why the drivers aren't being supported rather than Linux. You can use fglrx with newer kernels just fine, it's just that user space went out of it's way to break support.
I really fail to see how that has anything to do with Linux's unstable kernel driver API.
> OK, that calls out X.org as the reason why the drivers aren't being supported rather than Linux.
Ah, the Linux evangelist blame-game. It's a big advantage of a system being so haphazardly thrown together from separately developed components. Start by blaming the choice of distro, end up at "Linux is just a kernel".
I mean, I feel like that's valid in the context of this discussion. That being 'Linux's unstable driver API designed to push drivers as source into mainline causes ISVs headaches'.
How does that apply here when Linux didn't change and you can still use the same kernel driver, but some other component decided to not work with the driver anymore?
... a brand new, mainline kernel will run fglrx just fine. It's user space (specifically the x srever) that decided to break fglrx. So how is that the fault of the kernel's unstable API again?
I mean, everything runs on the kernel... but I assume you meant in the kernel.
Graphics drivers are split into three main pieces these days.
1) Kernel space that mainly sets up the GPU's MMU, and adds a context to the GPU's hardware thread scheduler. There'll be some modesetting too, but that piece is really simple (and fglrx never used the main kernel API for that anyway, so it doesn't really matter if it was stable or not. But it actually was pretty stable over the time frame we're talking about).
This piece still works fine on fglrx with a modern kernel.
2) A userspace component that lives with the window manager setting up the actual display output, and accelerating compositing. Stuff like EGL works by making IPC calls to this layer.
This is the piece that broke in your case, and only because the x server decided to change.
3) Another piece that runs in userspace and is ultimately what gets called by graphics APIs and is linked into every process making graphics calls. This is the vast majority of the driver.
