AMD A10-8700P making sure I get the most out of my system

[whitebunnyflock]

Hi everyone,

I recently loaded Debian Jessie 8.6 onto my Acer laptop. It has an AMD A10-8700P at the heart of the system. Had to do a bit of work to get the Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 wi-fi working on the machine but otherwise all has gone well. What my questions is, am I getting the most out of this machine by running Kernel 3.16? If not how can I tell which kernel to use that will properly support my hardware? The model number on the machine is E5-552G-T324. I have had a couple of random reboots that I havent been able to track down and sometimes wonder if perhaps not all is communicating with the hardware as it should be.

thanks in advance for your help

[vbrummond]

There is only one "generic" kernel for Debian that you need. The only thing I would recommend is possibly tracking testing/sid to get the latest kernel/mesa. If your performance seems satisfactory as it is, leave well enough alone. "Maxing out performance" isn't helpful if it already works 100% properly. Chances are you will just mess something up.

[whitebunnyflock]

the problem i have mainly with this setup the way it is, is that there is no support in kernel 3.16 for my wireless card, a Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377. I installed a second debian system and started to track stretch. I did a minimal upgrade (aptitude upgrade after adding stretch to my sources.list file). After updating all the packages I installed the latest and greatest kernel (4.8.0-amd64) and was unable to boot into the system without switching back to 3.16 (would freeze on bootup prior to even starting the X Server, updated video drivers to open source AMD ones and then it would still freeze with a kernel panic). I can't seem to find a debian kernel package for kernel 4.4 which would be nice since it does support the wi-fi out of the box. Am I missing something? I can run Linux Mint 18.1 and it has kernel 4.4.0 which supports the card however I much prefer to run Debian.