https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97055
--- Comment #12 from Thomas J. Moore darktjm@gmail.com --- (In reply to Josh from comment #11)
I too am affected by this issue.
It might help if you add yourself to the CC list. Not that anyone talks on this bug but me.
Is this issue ever going to be fixed?
I have my doubts. I have made efifb (nomodeset) my default boot now, so I can at least use this machine. Can't adjust brightness, play games or watch full-screen videos, but I guess I'll just have to live with that. The only way I expect this will ever get fixed for me is if I get enough money together to buy a new machine.
The fact is, the only changes I've noticed have been regressions. The non-start of X in 4.8 was fixed, but later 4.8-series kernels (and 4.9 kernels as well) seem to crash badly (panic? hard to tell, since I have no way of knowing what happens when the screen is black -- I can't even get LEDs on the keyboard to flash, since this piece of crap machine also suffers from a non-linux-compatible keyboard: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/233396/system-creates-extra-shift-al..., and my attempts to get it to log to EFI have been unsuccessful). The crash then forces a filesystem check on reboot, which takes forever and I don't have the patience to deal with that any more. I was able to get amdgpu running "properly" (w/o power management) in 4.8.11 eventually using a 4.4.32 kernel to do the initial boot with power management enabled, but it's still unreliable enough that it isn't worth trying very often.
I said I wouldn't report any more on the lack of progress, but yeah, 4.8.11 and 4.9-rc7 are still complete garbage, even worse than before.