Comment 72 for bug 1080350

An old thread, I know but I've experienced similar problems.

After upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04.3 to 16.04.1 with Xmonad window manager certain undesirable symptoms began to arise. Of course, fglrx was be removed and the xserver-xorg-driver-ati(?) graphics driver was installed instead. In 14.04 I was running the proprietary driver for the Intel part of the hybrid card. After upgrading some icons appear very large while others are normal. The laptop also runs about fifteen degC hotter. This is the most troubling aspect as it is detrimental to the health of the machine.

I reverted to Ubuntu 14.04.3 with linux-image-xxx-lts-wily as the latest combination of Ubuntu and linux kernel compatible with fglrx. All very well until dirtyCOW arose, as this kernel is no longer supported.

Question: Is this problem related to the others mentioned in this thread? Has there been a resolution since July 2016?

The following information may help:

Output of lspci -mm | grep VGA is:

00:01.0 "VGA compatible controller" "Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]" "Richland [Radeon HD 8650G]" "Hewlett-Packard Company" "Richland [Radeon HD 8650G]"

Output of sudo lshw -C video is

  *-display UNCLAIMED
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Richland [Radeon HD 8650G]
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 1
       bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0
       version: 00
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:5000(size=256) memory:f0400000-f043ffff
  *-display UNCLAIMED
       description: Display controller
       product: Sun XT [Radeon HD 8670A/8670M/8690M / R5 M330]
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: 00
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:f0300000-f033ffff ioport:4000(size=256) memory:f0340000-f035ffff

Output of lspci -nnk | grep -i vga -A3 is

00:01.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Richland [Radeon HD 8650G] [1002:990b]
    DeviceName: RICHLAND (990B)
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Richland [Radeon HD 8650G] [103c:1985]
    Kernel modules: radeon

Am I right in understanding that though the radeon kernel module is loaded it is not being used? If so, what must I do to use it?