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If I move the mouse or use the keyboard to do anything that would require redrawing the screen, it flickers, and then often goes black for a second or so. I found a number of similar problems, but I have not found this combination:

  • using a single monitor
  • AMD R9 380 graphics card (not nVidia)
  • independent of Google Chrome

I am using Legacy, not UEFI mode. I did not have this problem on 15.10 on the same machine. I have the same problem when booting into the 16.04 live CD. I installed the latest upgrades.

$ uname -a
Linux <machine-name> 4.4.0-36-generic #55-Ubuntu SMP Thu Aug 11 18:01:55 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available
Destributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
Release:        16.04
Codename:       xenial

$ lspci -nn | grep VGA
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Hawaii Pro [Radeon R9 290/390] [1002:67b1] (rev 80)

$ lshw -c video
*-display
     description: VGA compatible controller
     product: Hawaii PRO [Radeon R9 290/390]
     vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
     physical id: 0
     bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
     version: 80
     width: 64 bits
     clock: 33 MHz
     capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
     configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
     resources: irq: 128 memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d07fffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:dfd000000-dfd3ffff memory:dfd40000-dfd5ffff

I am a bit confused because this page says for my graphics card, amdgpu is installed but the last command says driver=radeon. I tried installing amdgpu: 

$ sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu libdrm-amdgpu1
xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu is already the newest version (1.1.0-1).
xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu set to manually installed.
libdrm-amdgpu1 is already the newest verison (2.4.67-1ubuntu0.16.04.2).
libdrm-amdgpu1 set to manually installed.

Booting with nomodeset works fine, but I understand then I have no 3D acceleration which would be unfortunate. My mainboard is an ASRock H170M Pro4 with latest BIOS (2.20) in case it matters.

Any ideas what I could try?

Ole
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  • Thanks Zacharee1. My symptoms are different, but I tried the proposed solutions and they did not work (see below). But upgrading the kernel seems to have solved this problem. – Ole Sep 19 '16 at 20:22
  • If you solved your problem yourself, please answer your own question and accept it. Don’t put the answer in your question or the comments! Send me a message in the comments if you want my up-vote. :-) – David Foerster Sep 20 '16 at 09:39
  • I did already answer my question below, but I forgot to accept it. Did that now, too. Thanks. – Ole Sep 21 '16 at 20:30

1 Answers1

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I am in the lucky situation to answer my own question:

Though the symptoms described in the question posted by Zacharee1 are different, I tried installing both Oibaf's drivers (did not change anything - still showed "radeon" after reboot, and still had the same issues) and amdgpu_pro (would not render anything but the desktop background - I had to uninstall it using a text shell).

What solved the problem for me in the end was updating the kernel:

mkdir tmp && cd tmp
wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.6-yakkety/linux-image-4.6.0-040600-generic_4.6.0-040600.201606100558_amd64.deb
wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.6-yakkety/linux-headers-4.6.0-040600-generic_4.6.0-040600.201606100558_amd64.deb
wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.6-yakkety/linux-headers-4.6.0-040600_4.6.0-040600.201606100558_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

And rebooted (using advanced options and picking the 4.6 kernel since my default grub entry was not updated). No more issues. I installed and ran glmark2 and scored 11872 points, with 890 FPS in the slowest test (and a few above 15k FPS), so I guess that means my graphics drivers are working. They still show up as radeon btw.

I did see Chrome having weird rendering issues though, we I could fix by disabling hardware acceleration for it in the settings. I will monitor if any other programs have such issues, and report here if I find a better solution for Chrome.

Ole
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