Hi Ludovic and Roland--

Thanks so much for your helpful (and sobering) replies!  If I had spent $50 (instead of $260) for this card, I would have already trashed it and just bought the Nvidia one (Quadro K1200)!  Clearly AMD is not a panacea for Linux video cards!  I may still do that, or maybe try to return it.)

Roland, what kernel modules are you running (radeon, amdgpu, both?) and what X server driver?  I get flashes much more often with X driver radeon, but FS video with mpv runs smoothly!

Ludovic, I don't have the card installed right now, but the family is VERDE as seen in this old Xorg output: (--) RADEON(0): Chipset: "VERDE" (ChipID = 0x682c)

I'm 99% sure that the amdgpu drivers are what I need for this card, which is a 2015 card.  I'm just amazed that a company that supports Linux so well would have a card this old failing this badly!  I have looked at many of the links you mention, and tried to blacklist the radeon module but without success.  I've tried many things, so I forget the exact symptoms of that failure.

After reading your replies, I re-looked at some of my other links, and found the following interesting one at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/444068/how-to-switch-drivers-from-radeon-to-amdgpu

Note at the bottom it states:

____________________________________________________________________
I've been doing a lot of digging around, and seems linux kernel 4.13.0 doesn't have driver support I think for my card. So I tested kernel 4.16.0-041600-generic, which loaded the amdgpudrmfb driver along with amdgpu. Also to get x server working I had to add some device specific settings for the amdgpu in xorg.conf after doing X -showopts in console TTY1 (ctrl+alt+F1) – cryptoboy May 17 '18 at 5:24
Additionally and I'm not sure if it was already blacklisted but I noticed in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf that radeonfb was blacklisted. I was thinking maybe the amdgpu-pro package did that ? – cryptoboy May 17 '18 at 5:26
I figured out why it stops booting past the point of loading the amdgpudrmfb, as seen in the image I posted, due to the fact I needed to pass to the kernel the following parameters: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="radeon.si_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1 radeon.cik_support=0" However, this goes to a blank screen, until I put in the xorg.conf configuration, which then everything loads fine. – cryptoboy May 17 '18 at 5:36
____________________________________________________________________


I have played with the CMDLINE stuff, and blacklisting, to no avail.  I wonder if compiling a 5.4 kernel would solve my graphics problem, and work with beowulf and/or asci?  I find it pretty hilarious that I picked this card over the Nvidia for minimum hassle out-of-the-box, have spent a couple of full days failing to get it working, and am now talking about compiling kernels!  When you've used Linux since 1992, you expect that you can solve any problem, but it's not always true!

Not sure what I'll do going forward, but thankful for the very helpful DNG list!

--Tim

    On Thursday, January 30, 2020, 7:10:49 AM UTC, Roland Gebhard Sidler <rgsidler@???> wrote:  

 Hi Ludovic,hi Tim, actually, I do have the same issues. I am running a Thinkstation P520Cwith a Radeon Firepro W4100 with a 4K Benq PD3200U. I literally spent weeks of searching information about this problem to get rid of the flickering,but without any success. I tried several distributions (Linux Mint, Devuan and actually MXLinux) without any difference. And I also tried the proprietary drivers, which didn't change anything,installing it after the open driver and by installing it as first driver. I even tried various connections (HDMI, DP). The problem appears irregularely and more frequently whilest watching videos.There is a slight difference between watching 4k/30fps and 4k/60fps, wheras 4k/60fpsshows less flickering of the whole screen than 4k/30fps. And after having watched a 4k/60fps video for some seconds,the screen won't flicker at all for several minutes. My guess is a timing problem of the AMD Firepro W4100. Might be, using a  AMD Radeon Pro WX xxxx would change that? Sincerely  Roland 
Am 30 Jan 2020 04:07:58 +0100 (CET) Von "Ludovic Bellière" <belliere.ludovic@???>:

Hello Tim,

First you need to know the chipset name of your card in order to know
it's family. To do that you need to run (or similar):

```
lspci | grep VGA
```

It's output on my desktop shows:

```
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
[AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480] (rev ef)
```

This tells me that the chipset name of my card is Ellesmere, which is
the POLARIS architecture. A quick look to [RadeonFeature][1] tells me
that POLARIS is part of the [Volcanic Islands family][2]. The [gentoo
wiki][3] might help too. Knowing the family is important, as it tells
you how to tell the kernel to load the amdgpu driver before radeon.

Because I suspect FirePro W4100 to be quite old, the [archlinux
howtos][4] might be helpful to you.

That being said, you might prefer installing the [proprietary
drivers][5] if you plan to use a professional card. I suspect taking
that road would come with its own set of problems.

I hope this helps,
Ludovic

[1]: https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/
[2]:
https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#decoderringforengineeringvsmarketingnames
[3]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU#Feature_support
[4]:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMDGPU#Enable_Southern_Islands_.28SI.29_and_Sea_Islands_.28CIK.29_support
[5]:
https://www.amd.com/en/support/professional-graphics/firepro/firepro-wx100-series/firepro-w4100

On 29/01/20 23:05, Tim Wallace via Dng wrote:
> I have been happily running ascii but upgraded from my Intel built-in
> graphics to an AMD FirePro W4100 because I do a lot of 4K video editing,
> but no game-playing, and thought this 50W card would save energy and
> work well with 4K.  There is a nearly identical Nvidia card, but I
> decided to support AMD, for easier Linux support, which has not been my
> experience!
>
> The card booted OK under ascii but was using the Radeon Xorg driver
> which gave flashing behavior from time to time, typical of a bad video
> driver.  I decided to try beowulf to get some newer versions of stuff.
>
> I installed a generic ascii on my other partition, then did the upgrade,
> from an xterm, perhaps not the smartest idea but it worked.  When I ran
> synaptic, it added and removed hundreds of packages!  Not exactly
> efficient, but I was left with a working system.  The only issue was
> that my Samsung M.2 SSD only boots as efi, and install systems don't
> seem to realize that, resulting in boot failure or boot install failure,
> but I used the rEFInd program to recover everything, and all seems good
> with both beowulf and ascii.
>
> The situation now is that I can't get the correct X video driver
> working, which should be the amdgpu one, under either ascii or beowulf.
> (Full screen 4K video plays great at 60 fps under mpv, with nothing
> dropped and no flashes.)  I did try disabling pretty much all the
> acceleration options on the radeon driver, but that did not help with
> the flashing.
>
> Details:
> Motherboard ASRock Z97 Extreme6, i7-4790K, 16 GB, latest Bios 2.80
>
> added non-free repository, and installed firmware.  On boot, both radeon
> and amdgpu kernel modules are installed.  When X starts, the radeon
> driver is used.  The xorg.conf output by Xorg -configure calls for the
> amdgpu driver, but trying to run, get fatal error:
>
> amdgpu_device_initialize: DRM version is 2.50.0 but this kernel is only
> compatible with 3.x.x
>
>
> Under ascii, the radeon driver is called for by Xorg -configure, and the
> error when forcing amdgpu is almost the same, except
>
>    ... DRM version is 2.49.0...
>
> It seems that there are some incompatibilities built into both ascii and
> beowulf when it comes to this card.  I could compile a kernel (which I
> used to do all the time in the 90's, and probably haven't done for 10
> years) if that would help with the DRM version issue.
>
> I tried the Ubuntu version of the proprietary driver from AMD, and it
> complained about the kernel version.  I could compile a kernel to match
> the Ubuntu one, I suppose, and re-try the proprietary driver, if anyone
> thinks that would help.  I'm not looking for the fastest performance in
> the world, though, just stability!
>
> Any advice?
>
> --Tim
>
>
>
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