I don't have the Hawaii Pro Radeon R9 290 hardware, but it appears even on Linux certain cards have problems with dpm and older firmware:
Radeonsi on Grenada cards (r9 390) exceptionally unstable and poorly performing https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91880 A short-term attempt to just get the card to work at all in xorg is to try and use the TUNABLE_INTs in sys/dev/drm/radeon/radeon_drv.c. In particular the radeon dpm setting can be a problem even on Linux. So perhaps try and disable it using: TUNABLE_INT("drm.radeon.dpm", &radeon_dpm); MODULE_PARM_DESC(dpm, "DPM support (1 = enable, 0 = disable, -1 = auto)"); module_param_named(dpm, radeon_dpm, int, 0444); The medium-term attempted fix as mentioned in the above bug report is to try and update some firmware and also some of the Radeon drm code to detect this firmware. One sample patch that only arrived at Linux 4.8 is: drm/radeon: load different smc firmware on some CI variants The power tables on some variants require different firmware. This may fix stability issues on some newer CI parts. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b2ea0dcd2790949802230bada9416d2362280138 This is one source for Radeon firmware: https://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/ https://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/hawaii/ https://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/k/
