Tried that and still getting the same error :(
The problem is that some distros have made an error in judgement.
This doesn't only concern AMD graphics cards but also some nVidia graphics cards.
Since kernel 3.13 merges DPM functions for both AMD and nVidia open source drivers, there is a problem when installing images that are not yet build with 3.13, but that are based upon an image that is made for 3.13.
The problem is basically that Sabayon, Manjaro, etc... in short, community distros that are bleeding edge but made by a smaller group of devs, do not shut down the cards correctly, and sometimes do not start the cards correctly, because they need kernel 3.13 for that, but the images are supplied with kernel 3.10 LTS or 3.12, which don't have the DPM instructions merged yet.
You can install with non-free drivers, which solves the problem, and is an option in both sabayon and manjaro (which is probably why they haven't uploaded new iso's).
You won't have the problem with distros that have more resources, e.g. it's not a problem with Fedora or OpenSuSE, but it will be a problem with most smaller community distros that offer a respin or fork thereof.
It will solve itself in about a week's time I guess, once the iso's are updated.
Kernel 3.13 is out since this weekend.
If you want to run open source AMD drivers, the best thing to do is to install Fedora Rawhide, how about almost two times the performance? With open source drivers that is, you don't need Catalyst. Fedora Rawhide contains more and more HSA orientated packages, it's going to be a speed demon on AMD. As for nVidia, there won't be a lot of change, except some basic DPM functions for nouveau, but the ARM-merges for nVidia ARM-chips are more exciting, basically, the "Tegra optimizations" will be freely accessible for ever more non-Tegra processors through linux (not through Android!), insofar there is application software that actually uses these optimizations (of which there is not a lot).
Does rawhide not have breakage though? I love free performance as much as the next guy, but with a 6870 I doubt I shall see much performance no? and possibly breakage? although moving to fedora rolling would be nice ;)
This is all going for my desktop though, As it is my play machine, so things dont have to be as stable as my netbook.
What you have stated about Manjaro and Sabayon would explain why my GPU crashes. Of course these community distros do not have the backing to do everything all the time, which of course it more than acceptable.
I am tempted to report the logs to Sabayon team to give a heads up :)
(Edit) also I would just like to ask, to upgrade to rawhide, I take it I use the yum command, but how is the debug kernel removed for performance?
Well, bug reporting won't bring a lot of benefit, they're just going to wait it out anyway and make a new iso with 3.13 as default kernel. They know the problem, they already have the solution, thing is that linux kernels come out during weekends, and 3.13 was delayed a few weeks, and the combination of both has caused the problem to surface. To be honest, most users won't even have the problem. It's typically a problem when you've run a bleeding edge distro on the system, which has updated the firmwares in the GPU cards, and then want to install another distro that hasn't yet implemented those.
Fedora Rawhide has occasional breakage, but not that much for all-round desktop use. The thing with rawhide is that there are very frequent updates, like constantly, and a lot of packages. You also have to keep up with the updates at all time. Now thanks to Presto/DeltaRPM, that's not tedious or enormously time consuming, it's just a few seconds, but it still has to be done. It's also best to do the updates from the terminal, and to look at the updates. Some updates, like libselinux policies, won't install, you have to setenforce 0 first, then yum update, and afterwards setenforce 1 again. Those things are not usual in release versions, so rawhide is a little more involving, but it's not obnoxious. The performance update is constantly described as "multiplication" of performance, and that is also my experience. I switched my gaming PC over to rawhide + RadeonSI as soon as the RedHat dev wrote the blog about the huge performance benefits that are already in Fedora rawhide, and it makes a huge difference. Of course, not with Catalyst. I'm also running Catalyst 13.30 on another rig with Fedora release, and that works great also (except of course flash, but that's always a problem in linux because Adobe wants it that way, because the Adobe DRM doesn't work in linux).
If you want Sabayon or Manjaro, use the non-free drivers option in the boot menu, and it will work. If you want Fedora, use release with Catalyst or rawhide with Radeon. All of those will work. You can also pull a rawhide iso instead of doing a source repo upgrade to rawhide, it saves some time, just see that you have a very recent rawhide iso if you go that route.
I do prefer Fedora atm, I may switch to gentoo at some point, but anyways, Do you have the link location for the rawhide ISO? I looked around the folders earlier and couldnt find it, could find .img files but no .ISO files.
What about the OSS driver for Radeon 6000 series GPUs in Rawhide? Work as well as RadeonSI drivers for 3D games?
You can find all images on the koji server, that is the fedora build system:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/tasks?state=all&view=tree&method=livecd&order=-id
But read before you download! This is a build server, some builds are still in progress...
Anyway, that's the source for the latest and greatest builds, for those that don't build themselves from git but still want the most recent stuff.
Thanks for the link, I presume the greens are safe, looking at x64 xfce
just thought i should add this here.
It's pretty simple if you don't mind the quick and dirty way. (I can write out the more elegant way completely, but it's quite a lot of CLI work, so I'll stick to the quick and dirty way here, which works, because I've tested it, and it's almost entirely GUI).
You start out with a standard Sabayon (non-Gnome!!!) install with kernel 3.12.
The first thing you do is "emerge --sync" in CLI, then at the end it will say that you have to "emerge --oneshot portage" before you do anything else. Do that.
Then launch rigo and let it first sync and then update (that takes quite a while).
Reboot.
After reboot, launch rigo and install the latest full GCC suite (4.7.something).
Launch chromium and download the beta driver (13.11 beta build 9.95) from amd.com (it's more recent than the 13.12 "release" driver).
Unpack the driver.
Open files and right click the .run installer, select permissions, check executable.
Run the driver installer as root from the CLI from the directory where it sits, with "./" in front of the file name.
Choose automatic driver installation.
It will complete but with errors. Ignore those.
Don't reboot yet.
Fire up Rigo, and install ati-config for kernel 3.12.
It will do stuff, and give feedback in the end saying it needs to configure files.
Accept all the configuration changes (you need to authenticate separately for that).
Reboot
check glxinfo if everything is market ATI or AMD (which it will be).
Enjoy gaming performance.
--zoltan
I do think many people will prefer to eselect the opencl and opengl instances manually and blacklist manually, nomodeset manually, etc... it's a very quick and dirty solution to do it like I described there, but it works, and it's easy, even though it's not a good example of how to do it by any stretch of the imagination.
It's also subject to change. Sabayon is bleeding edge, every week there are tons of updates, things will change, methods may have to be adapted, in bleeding edge, you always have to keep learning. This solution may work right now, but there is no guarantee that it will work after the next update.
I noticed that there is the ATI driver in Rigo, you could just install that? I followed your steps but could not find the ati kernel thing, So I installed that, GPU is running fine :)
Could this be the distro for my laptop through university? I got about halfway through the OP, but what would you consider, just roughly, as old/slow hardware that sabayon wouldn't run well/at all on?
It's not the latest driver though, if it even worked.
Check glxinfo, are you sure it switched opengl and opencl to ati/amd, or are you still on the open source driver?
Do you have amdcccle for configuring your graphics?
The ATI kernel thing is in Rigo, there are several entries of ati-drivers, each marked with the kernel version between brackets. The kernel 3.12 version is the right one.
The open source drivers are quite sufficient for most users though, it's just for some things, like MLL for example.
The 3.13 kernel brings RadeonSi performance about to the same level as Catalyst in most applications. Starting from kernel 3.14, in some applications RadeonSi should start to outperform Catalyst.
There's a game coming out based on Cryengine for linux (native). I haven't tried it yet, but I guess that will necessitate the Catalyst drivers also for the time being. I don't know about the situation with Mantle. It might just be that Mantle is not necessary in linux because all it does is bypass DirectX, but linux doesn't have the DirectX problem.
The coolest thing is that with the migration of game engines and APIs to native linux, it's going to be really easy to learn how they work, and the closed source implementations of the same software (Windows, XBox, Mac, etc...) are going to have such an incredible wave of hacking and cracking coming over them lolz. Like with the java exploit that created this huge botnet recently. Java is on linux machines also (in fact, on over a million linux machines that are activated per day with android), but no linux machine was hijacked for the botnet, there were only Windows and Mac machines where the exploit could actually do something to the system.
depends what you class as old, I have Sabayon on a Intel Atom 1.66Ghz 1GB RAM netbook, and it works perfectly fine, it cant reach the speed sabayon does on my gaming PC but that is to be expected, If not try Vector Linux, that should work perfectly.
Yeah, Sabayon is quite a good choice in my opinion. It installs software slower with portage, but if you need a quick fix you can always install binary packages from the repos with equo. There is a lot of flexibility in Sabayon. The details are also there, e.g. they have separate update notfiers for different DE's, things like that show that they definitely didn't save on effort. I'm very pleased with Sabayon 14.1, it's very powerful, but it's also more complex as a consequence, even though extremely user-friendly and stable.
If you find Sabayon too complex, Manjaro is an alternative. It's also a full-featured user-friendly distro, and being based on Arch it's definitely powerful, but not as powerful and complex as the Gentoo-based Sabayon.
I gave it a try based on your post. It's my first time using KDE in a while and I gotta say, It feels like this DE is a lot less hungry than it used to be. I can't main Sabayon yet because I'm a noob to Gentoo but the out of box experience is really nice. I really need to rethink my audio interface solution because the lack of proper drivers kills my audio setup... Maybe i'll find a way to simplify to get everything working with libffado and jack or whatever it was I used last time.
I think it's critical for a distro like this to give a great first impression for novices to keep them interested and willing to dive deeper into GNU/Linux and Sabayon is just that for me. If I've tried so many distros lately but I think Manjaro and Sabayon are the gateway drug and the way forward. Also, distrowatch has Mint, Debian and Ubuntu as 1,2 and 3. When did this happen and why? Vanilla Debian wasn't always so high up was it?
i think it has something to do with steamOS like zoltan mentioned elsewhere in this forum.
I checked via rigo, The kernel part is 3.12, I will also have to check the open source driver soon, But I have the correct kernel update.
Also RadeonSI does not work with R600 does it? Its open source I need for that no?
And speaking of hacking and exploits, my driving instructor believes that Symantecs security will beat Linux in security, now granted he has not got a clue how to work linux, But he believes AV does not cause slowdowns on start up due to using 1 core on boot and another for AV to load up, so dual core booting, he is also on SSD so boot times are nothing really, but the fact Linux needs no AV and boots faster than windows.
Also have you herd about something called Cryptolock, does this have an effect on Linux? He believes this to be so, but again no linux experience from him.
I believe that Distrowatch goes on DL base, now a lot of new users move to Ubuntu because its better marketed than Sabayon, Manjaro etc, that and it seems easier to use, which we know it is not, Unity is a mess.
Also I do too believe KDE is lot less resource hungry now, I prefer this on my desktop due to the amount of apps, I feel Sabayon XFCE does not handle many applications as well as KDE, But it seems to have improved, but most qt DEs are lightning.
And first impressions are always a plus point, but they can be false, I did not like Sabayon at first, same for Fedora, but I love both them distros now, there fast, bleeding edge and super easy to get along with, they are faster and better in the terminal department also.
i dont think so. cryptolock is pretty insane, a criminal can buy the software and load it on their malicious website and when window users go on there he/she get notified and can then proceed to extort money from their victims or else they will encrypt their PC and lock it out forever rendering it useless unless the user knows how to reinstall the OS.
Indeed, a normal linux install operated by a non-completely-dumbass user, is invulnerable to Cryptolock. It can't install, it can't even run, because of the rights management systems in linux.
Symantec is a joke, just like any other closed source anti-malware software. Everybody knows that the only way to protect Windows from malware, is through clamav on a linux box.