Why Does 14.04 Hate AMD?

[Jose Ildefonso Camargo Tolosa]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> On Monday 03 November 2014 06:49:08 Jesse Palser did opine
> And Gene did reply:
>> On 11/03/2014 06:38 AM, Bill Vance wrote:
>> > Its been a little while, so I'll ask:  Has 14.04
>> > improved to the point where it treats AMD machines
>> > in a civilized manner?  I wouldn't mind upgrading,
>> > but I don't want to keep wasting my time and effort
>> > on crap that won't work at all, let alone work
>> > properly.
>> >
>> > Bill
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> My AMD GPU constantly crashes Flash in Google Chrome,
>> so no - nothing has improved....
>>
>> :(
>>
>> Jesse
>
> I am getting the "Oh snap" displays from chromium entirely too often, and
> don't even have an AMD GPU.  NVidia video, neauvou driver.

I had a similar problem, in my particular case, in turned out that the
number of open files limit was being reached by Chrome (the default
limit is relatively low, at 1024), I raised it to 16384: no problems
since then.  Of course, I ran chrome from a terminal first, and
observed the error messages, only then I was able to tell that the
problem was indeed the open files limit.

You can check this value by running ulimit -n, and you can change it
by editing /etc/security/limits.conf or by creating a new .conf file
in /etc/security/limits.d/ and adding these lines:

*               hard    nofile          65535
*               soft    nofile          16384

Now, following a bit more with the thread, I have had some sporadic
drawing issues with my AMD GPU on Kubuntu 14.04: the whole window
would start blinking, with a distorted image in it, it usually gets
fixed my minimizing and restoring the window, but sometimes I have to
close the affected application (usually a web browser, either Firefox
or Chrome, but sometimes the steam client) and open it again.

Ildefonso