I’ve blogged about getting Manjaro Linux to work with my AMD RX 470 before. The method described in that post got my AMD RX 470 graphics card working with the default 4.4 kernel. This worked fine - with the usual caveats regarding VESA software rendering - until I tried to upgrade to newer versions of the kernel.

My understanding is that the 4.4 kernel series doesn’t include drivers for the relatively recent AMD RX 470 GPUs, whereas later kernel series (4.8 and 4.9 specifically) do. Unfortunately trying to boot into a 4.9 kernel resulted in the X server locking up so well that even the usual Alt-Fx didn’t get me to a console to fix the problem.