Ubuntu 15.10 Release fglrx issue

Question

Just upgraded from 15.04 to 15.10 via apt-get dist-upgrade. Nothing was customized, everything running from official repos.

Before upgrade I already purged all fglrx proprietary driver from the system and running on standard radeon driver.

The upgrade went successful and after booting into new 15.10 im installing fglrx again via Software & Updates for proprietary driver, no errors installation was success.

However during booting up to make the driver kicks in, the booting stucked at below error:

fb: switching to fglrxdrmfb from EFI VGA

My display:

root@mylenovo:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# lshw -c display
  *-display               
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Mullins [Radeon R4/R5 Graphics]
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 1
       bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0
       version: 00
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
       resources: irq:37 memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:f0000000-f07fffff ioport:3000(size=256) memory:f0c00000-f0c3ffff memory:f0800000-f081ffff

Any thing that I missed causing fglrx not to work?

Answer 1

I guess you have read the Wily release notes saying

AMD's fglrx driver does not work with the current kernel (1493888).
It is warmly recommended to uninstall the fglrx driver before upgrading to
Ubuntu 15.10.
The open source "radeon" driver can be used as a temporary replacement
until a fix is available. 

Why else would you have removed fglrx before upgrade in the first place?

Either downgrade to Kernel 4.1 or use radeon until a fix of fglrx becomes available.

Bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/1493888

Answer 2

The fglrx bug is now solved.

Before, I had to boot on my backup install to disable fglrx and use the open driver instead, which is slow. Maybe Grub advanced booting on the same install but using the previous kernel works for those who are stuck.

Since, I updated Ubuntu through Update Manager, and also updated fglrx-core package through Synaptics Packager Manager (not sure this is needed). Then, I switched the graphic driver back to fglrx-update and rebooted.

Answer 3

It's always safest to stick with LTS releases, by using the rolling release you're acknowledging that you will deal with problems like this... 16.04 is the next LTS release (look for it in April). It might be that the LTS suffers from this too, but I would highly doubt it, as the LTS versions are supposed to be stable for production environments.

There are ways to get fglrx to work, but honestly unless you have a specific need for fglrx, the open source drivers that come with Ubuntu by default are actually quite good now for AMD hardware anyway. They are far more stable, and only missing a few features that not too many games are using yet. The FPS is comparable, and in some cases better (but most likely you'll get a few fps less). At least, this is in my experience on an R7 260x. It could be that newer cards are not well supported, I wouldn't know.

I can tell you that fglrx will cause Kerbal Space Program (a unity game) to crash consistently, whereas the open source Radeon drivers are rock solid, probably be even better than the closed source drivers in a few years (as they get a more feature-complete implementation).