Installing the Proprietary AMD Crimson driver on Fedora 23 with Linux Kernel 4.4.6-300

I’ll say it again: the community support for this process has been amazing.  I apologize to everyone for not getting to this sooner, but life has been insane.  That said, I’ve put together a brief description of the process needed thanks to the critical information and unified patch provided by the noble nenad.  All your thanks are belong to him, Jason, Steven Haigh, survient, John, Jay V, Suren…

You know, I’d go on, but the list would be so long it’d be like credits in a movie (read and remembered by no one).  Everyone has really pulled together, and it makes me sad to be out of the loop now given my lack of an AMD card (although I’m really <3ing my Nvidia card.. the driver automatically rebuilds with DKMS during kernel updates and it has a built-in updater for the driver itself; it’s quite lovely).

Here’s the patch from nenad.  I can’t vouch for it myself, but I have faith in him.  It looks pretty simple and straightforward to me, and you can, of course, judge for yourself.  Download that patch and follow the instructions below:

1.  Downgrade xorg-x11-server-Xorg and xorg-x11-server-common to the F22 version:

$ dnf downgrade xorg-x11-server-Xorg xorg-x11-server-common –-allowerasing –-releasever=22

2.  Add the following exclusion line to your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora* files:

exclude=xorg-x11-server-Xorg xorg-x11-server-common

3.  Reboot

4. Copy the missing header file into the proper location

$ sudo cp /usr/include/linux/version.h /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include/linux/

5.  Download the latest Crimson driver (x86|x86_64) to your ~/Downloads directory.

6.  Unzip the driver and unpack the run archive

$ cd ~/Downloads
$ unzip radeon-crimson-15.12-15.302-151217a-297685e.zip
$ mv 
$ cd fglrx-15.302/
$ sh amd-driver-installer-15.302-x86.x86_64.run --extract

7.  Change into the newly created fglrx-install* directory (a mutex value will be created uniquely on your system where the asterisk is) and download and apply the patch:

$ cd fglrx-install.NHKnz0/
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/imageguy/fglrx-for-Fedora/master/fglrx_kernel_4.4.diff
$ patch -p1 < fglrx_kernel_4.4.diff
patching file common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/firegl_public.c

8.  In the installation GUI, choose to “Install driver 15.302 on X.Org 6.9 or later 64-bit”.  Do not generate a package for any particular distro (which should obviously be a bad choice since Fedora 23 is not listed).

Note:  There is some hypothesizing that sudo will not work and that the user context from which the installation takes place must be root.  I’d be interested in tests, here – I suspect sudo works.  If you want to be really cautious, first su to root and then run the below command without sudo.

$ sudo ./ati-installer.sh 15.302 –install

9.  Reboot again and things should be looking good!

Troubleshooting

As issues come up and are addressed, I’ll try to list them here.

I hope this works for everyone!