AMDGPU driver for radeon Southern Islands and Sea Islands cards on Ubuntu 17.04
The 17.04 release of Ubuntu Linux has decent (but experimental) support for older radeon cards.
History
For a long time, AMD graphics cards on Linux ran using the fglrx driver. This driver provided good hardware acceleration but was a binary blob that required AMD to update it every time a new version of linux arrived.
Several years ago, AMD announced a new open source project, the AMDGPU driver, which is much better for linux. However, it only supported newer radeon cards and older cards built on GCN 1.0/Southern Islands (SI) and GCN 1.1/Sea Islands architectures were unsupported.
This became a problem with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, when fglrx was no longer included in favour of AMDGPU. Instead the system defaults to the open source radeon driver, which is solid but basic. This left SI card owners stuck on an older version of Ubuntu.
The development of AMDGPU has finally added experimental support for the older cards and Ubuntu 17.04 takes advantage of that!
The driver comes with the distribution and support for the driver is already compiled into the kernel that ships with the distro.
AMDGPU on Ubuntu 17.04
This is for GCN 1.0/Southern Island cards and GCN 1.1/Sea Islands cards only.
Varun Priolkar wrote an excellent guide for Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10. The only amendment for Ubuntu 17.04 is that to use the new amdgpu driver just blacklist the radeon driver. No need to install a new kernel.
