So I've been using the open source drivers on my Fury X right now. Mainly because they seem to give me better performance in Borderlands 2 (my main game on Linux right now) but I will switch back to the proprietary drivers as soon as I start playing a game a lot where the open source drivers perform worse than the proprietary drivers. Now with Kernel 4.5 and powerplay this performance is supposed get even better but I'm an impatient bastard willing to get his hands dirty and for people like me AMD has released a patch. However I have no idea how to apply the patch to the stock arch Kernel. I'm running Kernel 4.4-3 from the testing repo
TL;DR: How do I apply the powerplay patch to the stock arch kernel version 4.4?
You'll probably need to recompile the kernel. Download the 4.4-3 kernel, download the patch, for 4.4-3 kernel. extract the kernel tar -xf linux-4.4-3.tar.xz or however it's called. use the patch program to patch the source code, Usually patch -np1. From there, you can zcat /proc/config.gz > ./.config to copy your current kernel's configuration. Then you want to do make -j9 and make modules_install -j9 Assuming you're using an 8 core cpu. (rule for -j is number of cpu cores or threads plus 1) from there, you can find your compiled kernel in ./arch/x86_64/ relative to the directory you compiled in. From there, you'll need to copy it to /boot, rebuild your initcpio, remake your bootloader config (if grub grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg) and you'll be good.
It will probably take a good 20 to 40 minutes to compile, depending on how powerful your CPU is.
I couldn't tell you where to find the patch file, but make sure it's a .patch suffix, not .gz or something. otherwise you'll need to unzip it.
I haven't looked at how to get the patch either yet but what worries me more is that the kernel I downloaded from https://www.archlinux.org/packages/testing/x86_64/linux/ is a pacman package and has a lot less files than a kernel from kernel.org so I don't really know where to get the kernel source file with the arch patches
https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk?h=packages/linux
If you're using the arch linux package, these patches will help you out. This page Is your friend.
Yes I recognize these pages as I've been on them multiple times in the past week but I still don't really know how to get the patches from the git repo in order to apply them as I still am a bit of a newb when it comes to patching kernels
I finally got the kernel sources for arch kernel version 4.4-4 using abs testing. Though I still don't know which patches are the right ones and how I'm supposed to get them from the git repository but here's a link to the mailing list which has a link to the repository:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-November/094230.html
EDIT: I'm not even sure what to pick
I completely forgot to post that I've solved my problem. I ended up just downloading the linux-git package from the aur and I replaced the source url with the one for the amdgpu git branch and I was able to just compile it and I am running it right now. But thanks anyway, I may try out the 4.5rc now