(In reply to John Bridgman from comment #108)
> Chris, are you using the -k firmware files and associated kernel patches,
> updated initrd if needed, etc... ?
> 
> My impression is that a few different issues are being discussed in this one
> ticket, and that is hampering progress. Not quite sure what the right split
> would be (if we were to close this and replace with N more focused tickets)
> but probably one of them should be for stability problems when running the
> -k firmware and checking whether locking dpm level to performance makes a
> difference.

My question would be: Why isn't the _k patch already in linux-git?

I tested the patch on my R9 390, so the Hawaii-specific part of the patch works
on at least one machine in the world outside of freedesktop.org.

Or is there a reason to delay patch submission to linux-git?

_k firmware files are already available in Gentoo Linux for example.