Hello list, I was looking at the page I quoted this morning in the AMDGPU thread and made an important discovery. The second Note box told me to unset the ATI Radeon option, which I'd had set until then. It's an AMD/ATI card, so I thought I'd need both AMD and ATI set. Don't laugh.
Last year some time I was complaining about some rapid flickering of the screen, together with general confusion of the display driver, which was provoked by running the boinc manager. Guess what? Unsetting that kernel option seems to have fixed the problem. Just thought I'd mention it in case it's useful to anyone else. -- Regards Peter