Ubuntu 16.04 radeon drivers for AMD R7/260x

Question

I am tying to upgrade to 16.04 and I don't think that the radeon driver is working properly. anecdotally, games are not running well and it looks like I am using software rendering

First, this page for the radeon driver says that the AMD R7/260X is supported

I first check which card I have installed

$ lspci | grep VGA

I get

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Bonaire XTX [Radeon R7 260X/360]

The card is as I suspectetd and the chipset is allegdly supported. However, when I run

LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo | grep llvm

I get the following

OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 4.0, 128 bits)

This implied that I am not using the radeon driver for and am using software rendering.

The final nail in the coffin comes from running

/usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p

Which gives

OpenGL vendor string:   VMware, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 4.0, 128 bits)
OpenGL version string:  3.0 Mesa 17.0.7

Not software rendered:    no
Not blacklisted:          yes
GLX fbconfig:             yes
GLX texture from pixmap:  yes
GL npot or rect textures: yes
GL vertex program:        yes
GL fragment program:      yes
GL vertex buffer object:  yes
GL framebuffer object:    yes
GL version is 1.4+:       yes

Unity 3D supported:       no

I could try installing AMDGPU pro but I am running 16.04.03

$lsb_release -a

> No LSB modules are available.
> Distributor ID:   Ubuntu
> Description:  Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
> Release:  16.04
> Codename: xenial

And according to this page, 16.04.3 is not currently supported

So, my questions are

1. Is there any further configuration I should do to make the radeon driver work?

2. Is the Bonaire chip and the R7 260X really supported by radeon? I have seen some older posts saying it is not.

3. Any other debugging suggestions or solutions?

thanks

Answer 1

I found a solution. The problem was that the old (no longer supported) fglrx drivers were not completely deleted when I upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04. I used synaptix to search for all flglrx packages and purged them. After a reboot, the radeon driver was detected and used

As a bonus, the radeon driver works better than fglrx ever did

Answer 2

I used ctrl-alt-f2 then

sudo apt-get purge

to remove my faulty fglrx,fglrx-core,fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-dev and get the original back.