System freeze when using catalyst driver and xorg 1.16

Question

As the title says, my computer freezes up when using the catalyst drivers.  This happens even when I haven't run startx (happens even when I ssh).  Typically I would check my syslog after a crash, right?  However, I don't see a syslog in /var/log.  How would I go about troubleshooting this?
EDIT:
Okay I discovered journalctl  .  I ran journalctl --since=today and the point in time at which my computer froze and had to be rebooted was blank.  Here is the relevant part of the log...
Feb 26 21:56:47 kodi systemd[554]: Starting Default.
Feb 26 21:56:47 kodi systemd[554]: Reached target Default.
Feb 26 21:56:47 kodi systemd[554]: Startup finished in 11ms.
-- Reboot --
Feb 26 22:04:36 kodi systemd-journal[141]: Runtime journal is using 8.0M (max allowed 84.6M, trying to leave 127.0M free of 838.9M available → current limit 8
Feb 26 22:04:36 kodi systemd-journal[141]: Permanent journal is using 64.0M (max allowed 2.7G, trying to leave 4.0G free of 22.3G available → current limit 2.
Feb 26 22:04:36 kodi systemd-journal[141]: Time spent on flushing to /var is 1.152ms for 2 entries.
My computer froze at about 22:03.  That portion is missing from the log so I have no way of knowing what caused the freeze.
EDIT2:
I should also mention that I recently upgraded so I'm running kernel 3.18.6-1-ARCH.  Will the catalyst drivers work with this kernel?  I did not have a problem with the old kernel, which I think was 3.16
Last edited by necbot (2015-02-27 02:34:49)

Answer 1

necbot wrote:I should also mention that I recently upgraded so I'm running kernel 3.18.6-1-ARCH.  Will the catalyst drivers work with this kernel?  I did not have a problem with the old kernel, which I think was 3.16
First of all - I'm AMD APU user but I've not used Catalyst for a long time, then please be carefull with my opinion. When we can read on Release note, the latest Catalyst driver works with:
- Xorg/Xserver 7.4 and above (up to 1.16)
- Linux kernel 2.6 or above (up to 3.17)
- glibc version 2.2 or 2.3
- POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is required for 3D applications
see: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-article … Notes.aspx but on AUR we can read, that this driver is for linux < 3.19 (then kernel 3.18 is supported). This is possible because lano1106_fglrx-13.8_proc.patch but, of course, it's not official, upstream patch. From the other hand, I know that Ubuntu's users has seriously problem with Catalyst on Xorg 1.16.