On 05/24/2012 09:55 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 2:44 AM, zxq9<[email protected]> wrote:A digression about the driver on SL6: The annoying thing is that every time you update your kernel you'll need to rebuild the drivers against the new kernel headers. The awesome part is that the driver building process is mostly automated for you, AMD has lately done a very nice job of maintaining its driver set for Linux, games, CAD, and anything else graphical you want to do really fly on an A8, and all this is free (both types of "free" -- AMD opensourced its Linux drivers, so the Catalyst package is no longer "evil", or at least not as evil as it once was). I wrote a procedure for the E350 (with some background) that should work fine on your A8 on the SL forums here: http://scientificlinuxforum.org/index.php?showtopic=415&view=findpost&p=7102 Procedural notes for SL6 have also been added to the AMD driver wiki here: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Scientific_Linux#Scientific_Linux_6x The AMD release page is here: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx (if not you can select your type from http://support.amd.com ) Hope the explanation didn't confuse, and that the driver links are helpful.... Or head for elrepo.org and install kmod-fglrx : http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-fglrx It survives kernel updates transparently, so there is no need to rebuild/install each time you update the kernel. Also, 'yum update' will update the version of the ATI driver when a new version of the driver becomes available. Basically, it a 'install once and forget forever' type operation. :-) In Scientific Linux 6, setting up ELRepo is as easy as: yum install elrepo-release Akemi
A note on this... in our experience there is a slight performance difference between the generically built ELRepo driver package and ones built directly against your kernel header on your hardware.
In the case of an A-series processor this probably won't be noticable unless you are an extremely demanding gamer, but on lighter systems like the E-series APUs using them as 3D CAD stations or enabling the desktop eye candy is just a touch annoying without letting the GPU pull out all its tricks.
