Hi Bdot,
You're welcome!
I had checked what's with 14.6beta, and it turned out that the driver developers changed the way parameters (buffers) are passed to the kernel. It's improved and uses less instructions and less vregs for my small testcase. It need some time but unfortunately my current job doesn't involve gpu programming, so thats why it is stuck at 13.4. Btw I wonder if 13.4 supports the new R290 cards. Maybe not, and then this is indeed a problem... But sooner or later I gonna have time off, and then I wanna do some hobby programming on GCN, so I'll probably have time to understand how the new elf works.
"I noticed that Cat14.4 does write -save-temps ... is that what was needed for the disasm to work?"
The problem is with -save-temps -fno-opencl -fno-il -fno-llvmir combination. It produces an ELF that only contains the binary executable. And you are unable to load this type of elf and disasm it, unless you are using an older catalyst (below 13.4 for example 12.10 is great). So you can see disasm for the opencl test, but no disasm for the mandelbrot example which is written in asm, and it has no higher level sources included in the elf file.