Ubuntu 15.10's Kernel Is Biting Some Radeon Hardware
While Ubuntu 15.10 is set to ship next week and has passed its final freeze a few days ago, the default kernel of Ubuntu 15.10 is running into some troubles with select Radeon GPUs on the open-source driver.
As mentioned earlier today in an unrelated article, I'm in the process of running some Ubuntu 15.04 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 graphics tests, mostly focused on the AMD side. While I've tested several Radeon GPUs under a clean install of Ubuntu 15.04 and that all went fine, under Ubuntu 15.10, some of these cards no longer play nicely. This isn't for some AMDGPU-supported new GPUs, but for hardware that's been supported for a while like the Radeon R7 370 and R9 270X.
After a brief time of firing up some OpenGL graphics tests on select AMD GPUs using a clean, out-of-the-box Ubuntu 15.10 install with its Linux 4.2 kernel, I'm losing the display. When SSH'ing into the system, the Radeon DRM driver is taking a dump. The GPU lockups usually come down like as follows and can be triggered easily via tests like Team Fortress 2 or Unigine Valley:
If you hit similar issues on a clean install of Ubuntu 15.10, there's always the wonderful Ubuntu Mainline Kernel repository with more fresh kernel builds. You can share your Ubuntu 15.10 graphics driver experiences by commenting on this article in the forums. Soon I'll have out the start of the Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 graphics results for the AMD hardware playing nicely on both distribution releases out-of-the-box.
As mentioned earlier today in an unrelated article, I'm in the process of running some Ubuntu 15.04 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 graphics tests, mostly focused on the AMD side. While I've tested several Radeon GPUs under a clean install of Ubuntu 15.04 and that all went fine, under Ubuntu 15.10, some of these cards no longer play nicely. This isn't for some AMDGPU-supported new GPUs, but for hardware that's been supported for a while like the Radeon R7 370 and R9 270X.
After a brief time of firing up some OpenGL graphics tests on select AMD GPUs using a clean, out-of-the-box Ubuntu 15.10 install with its Linux 4.2 kernel, I'm losing the display. When SSH'ing into the system, the Radeon DRM driver is taking a dump. The GPU lockups usually come down like as follows and can be triggered easily via tests like Team Fortress 2 or Unigine Valley:
[ 1829.141156] radeon 0000:03:00.0: ring 0 stalled for more than 10000msecStrangely, I don't recall hitting so many GPU lockups on any vanilla Linux 4.2 kernel builds nor when using Linux 4.3 Git with my Radeon DRM tests. Again, the issue is with older cards like the R9 270X and R7 370 that worked fine on Ubuntu 15.04 and generally don't regress too much these days. Hopefully the Ubuntu kernel team will be sending down an SRU not too far out.
[ 1829.141163] radeon 0000:03:00.0: GPU lockup (current fence id 0x0000000000062605 last fence id 0x000000000006260d on ring 0)
[ 1830.050158] BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at ffffc90401e71ffc
[ 1830.050185] IP: [
If you hit similar issues on a clean install of Ubuntu 15.10, there's always the wonderful Ubuntu Mainline Kernel repository with more fresh kernel builds. You can share your Ubuntu 15.10 graphics driver experiences by commenting on this article in the forums. Soon I'll have out the start of the Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 graphics results for the AMD hardware playing nicely on both distribution releases out-of-the-box.