AMD Is Open-Sourcing Their Official Vulkan Linux Driver (phoronix.com) 75
An anonymous reader writes: While many of you have likely heard of the "RADV" open-source Vulkan driver, it's been a community-written driver up to this point in the absence of AMD's official, cross-platform Vulkan driver being open-source. That's now changed with AMD now open-sourcing their official Vulkan driver. The code drop is imminent and they are encouraging the use of it for quick support of new AMD hardware, access to the Radeon GPU Profiler, easy integration of AMD Vulkan extensions, and enabling third-party extensions. For now at least it does provide better Vulkan performance than RADV but the RADV developers have indicated they plan to continue development of their Mesa-based Vulkan driver.
He who controls the geeks controls the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He who controls the geeks controls the future (Score:5, Funny)
Where have I heard that before?
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Not the same thing.
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Wrong open-sourcing effort (Score:3)
Oh, I think it is. In this era of GPU-driven machine learning, commitment == lockin. AMD is inviting people to play right down on the metal with this.
You got the wrong opensource driver.
Vulkan is about "right down on the metal" mostly in the graphics departement (through there are idea to run computations using Vulkan).
The "right down on the metal" drivers stack that got open sourced by AMD that target "GPU-driven machin learning" (and any other GPU computation), is the ROCm + OpenCL stack (with ROCm being the "down on the metal" part).
AMD has recently finished their opensourcing efforts for that one too, and the necessary component are in the process of
no news... (Score:2)
I've heard that all the required stuff for ROCm should be upstreamed by 4.16. Is that true?
I can't be of any help here. My information don't go beyond what's currently being spoken about on phoronix
(though in addition to upstreaming stuff into the 4.16 kernel, I think there are also things that need to be upstreamed into LLVM too, for the CL language compilation, etc.) : My current work in research doesn't involve much gpgpu computing, and I haven't been playing at home with openCL cryptocoin mining for a while.
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If that's something you actually care about and know how to make proper use of
Open-source efforts: AMD has been doing it for age (Score:2)
The driver code will show how to talk directly to the hardware;
The lower level of the stack has been available for ages :
Initially in the form of "radeon.ko" a separate opensource effort progressively more and more supported by AMD themselve.
And the "amdgpu.ko" as part of a complete rewrite from the ground up by AMD devs, with the aim to enable as much code sharing as possible including between multiple drivers stacks (used by both the usual opensource driver stack AMD has been supporting, and amdgpu-pro - basically a binary libGL.so that is the current day successor o
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Re:He who controls the geeks controls the future (Score:4, Informative)
AMD has understood this like a decade ago. They've invested _a lot_ in open source graphics stack, release the specs (even they still have proprietary FGLXR driver), and SUSE employs developers who solely do Radeon drivers based on these specs. You gotta be slightly careful when getting cards, but all in all, the open source driver is freaking fantastic (on older R280 mine beating FGLXR in performance on most open source games).
Check out https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/
AMD and opensource (Score:4, Informative)
They've invested _a lot_ in open source graphics stack, release the specs (even they still have proprietary FGLXR driver)
I might even add :
their opensource driver is now currently considered the "official recommended one", while AMDGPU-PRO (the current closed source one, basically the successor of FGLXR, but with bits rewritten from scratch for better code sharing with the opensource drivers - it's mostly only a blob "libGL.so") is currently only recommended for workstation users that have weird compatibility requirement for "that old mission-critical CAD software over there" that requires compatibility profiles.
but all in all, the open source driver is freaking fantastic (on older R280 mine beating FGLXR in performance on most open source games).
One of the reason for AMD to recommend the opensource drivers is exactly this.
Add to that the finally managed to get DAL/DC/whatever-it's-called-now upstream in the kernel, and the recently open-source ROCm + OpenCL stack is also in the process of getting upstreamed...
It globally sounds very nice.
We just needs to see how this opensourced "official" Vuklan drivers co-evolves with the community-built "RADV" one.
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AMD has but ATI did not. ATI literally laughed in the face of open source and especially Linux. I know because I was there when their president of marketing laughed in my face when I asked about broader Linux support and higher quality drivers.
The ATI/AMD products have suffered because ATI was such a shitty company with shitty drivers and shitty executives. NVIDIA on the other hand has always embraced the Linux community. While these days people like to shit on them NVIDIA supported Linux while ATI was lite
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AMD has but ATI did not. ATI literally laughed in the face of open source and especially Linux.
Actually no. ATI supported and funded open source driver development from the time that Linux gaming became a possibility (~1998 with the introduction of DRI) until 2002 when we acquired FireGL and hoped that their pre-existing closed-source Linux workstation driver (fglrx) would be a good replacement. As it turned out, fglrx was OK for workstation users but never worked out well for consumer/desktop users. We looked at restarting the open source driver effort a couple of times but since that was also the p
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Your whole rant is ridiculous because the problems you encountered were due to the driver not being open source, which apparently is now going to change
Time has passed. (Score:4, Informative)
Yup, there used to be, a long time ago, a period where basically you had closed-source FGLRX which was feature complete, but extremely buggy and crash-prone. And the then-recently started various opensource source drivers efforts (some by AMD opensource devs, other completely reverse engineered by 3rd party devs...) which were lacking lots of feature, though a lot more stable than the blobs.
That was about a decade ago.
In 2017, the official driver according to AMD *is* the opensource driver, it's feature complete (full support up to GL 4.5 and GLES 3.1 [mesamatrix.net], 4.6 should be ready soonish), maintained upstream (in vanilla kernel and mesa3d) by paid developpers including on AMD's payroll.
It's fucking stable.
(In my opinion, best experience with a rolling-release distro like openSUSE Tumbleweed - which has an up-to-date kernel/Mesa3d/LLVM and GPU drivers devs on their payroll)
Meanwhile, Nvidia are still problematic with laptops (mainly due to not playing nice with the linux API to handle weird stuff like optimus, etc.) sometime very broken (due to insisting on using user-mode-setting, on my laptop it's just plain broken whenever the laptops goes into/resumes sleep).
I personally have to resort to nouveau, which is great piece of work (given the way it was developed through reverse engineering only) but needs to constantly play catch-up and will always be lagging feature-wise.
(At least with my rolling distro, I'm getting fixes not long after they are written by the devs).
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AMD open-source stack (Score:2)
When I first read the story, it sounded to me like just the 3D Vulkan driver was going to be open-sourced.
Correct, today article is about the official AMD's Vulkan driver joining the current giant open-source gang-band that has been going in the kernel.
It's just he latest bit to be added.
Then I read this and it sounds like you are implying that the whole kit and caboodle has been open sourced.
Yup, the whole rest has been open-source more or less for ages. This last bit more or less completes everything (except for a few tiny bits that are only available in the closed-source GL and which only target a few weird cases, mostly closed-source CAD software on workstations and of absolutely no relevance in the Linux open-s
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It's unfortunately that you are so incredibly wrong about the Radeon cards on Linux.
I suppose that's what happens when you form permanent opinions about something and continue believing that for a decade.
Re: He who controls the geeks controls the future (Score:2)
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It depends on how they opensource it. We've seen this out of AMD before. Dumping a bunch of manuals and code on volunteers doesn't actually do much.
I don't care if I pay more for Nvidia because Nvidia pays people to develop drivers for my platforms and they work. I don't have any "closed binaries" moral issue when I need to get work done. AMD just dumped their codebase and said "Hey, there it is, do our work for us as well as pay us money for the hardware".
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Yah, because the proprietary NV drivers on linux is such a great experience free of oddness. /s
AMD is doing the right things, which is nice. And beyond that, the experience is good for modern AMD hardware on Linux.
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AMD just dumped their codebase and said "Hey, there it is, do our work for us as well as pay us money for the hardware".
Citation needed. I don't think we have ever done that with Linux drivers. We have been hiring developers to contribute to the existing open source driver projects for a decade now. If you think we dumped a driver code base and walked away from it please give me an idea what you are talking about. Thanks.
They've done the impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
Nvidia and firmware makers tell us it's impossible because of 3rd party, security, competitive edge and a whole bunch of what now looks like excuses. I would love to hear from all the nay sayers how it was made possible ;)
well done, I hope system makers start making intel CPU with AMD GPU (sorry not meant as a back hand compliment)
Re:They've done the impossible (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty safe bet, now that Intel CPU + AMD GPU on a chip [anandtech.com] has been announced.
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Intel has been playing catch-up in the integrated GPU space for years. While they are getting better, they're still leaps and bound behind AMD's APU's.
That said, I'm curious where things will shake out 5 to 10 years down the line. Maybe Intel will have learned a bit about GPU's and not be so friendly with AMD.
It is ironic you say that... (Score:2, Insightful)
Because AMD via AGESA has locked up all that same firmware on both the CPU/Motherboard and GPU platforms as closed source opaque and proprietary modules, same as everyone else.
What Intel and AMD have done (and Nvidia may have to do in the future in order to survive) is foist the many eyes/bugfixing part for the more resource intensive part of the driver architecture on the open source community, while maintaining control over the aspects which most endanger the end-user, while providing security to the cont
Re: It is ironic you say that... (Score:2)
Unless we can get new players into both the cpu/motherboard platform ecosystem, and the GPU/Compute ecosystem, we are going to find ourselves with less and less control of own devices...
Are "new players" somehow resistant to National Security Letters?
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[W]ell done, I hope system makers start making intel CPU with AMD GPU....
This strengthens my decision to buy AMD everywhere.
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I'm definitely favoring AMD cards for my Linux computers now, which is all but one of them! I may even give AMD cards a closer look on my gaming PC since they tend to get handed-down to one of the non-gaming PCs later on. It's a shame Nvidia has a practical monopoly on GPU-accelerated physics.
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- a handful use GPU PhysX, but that's just newspapers on the floor in some random Batman game
Don't forget flying glass shards and billowing plastic sheets in Mirror's Edge 1!
(There are a few others)
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Cool story. Now be a good consumer and purchase more products. Only way to get that feeling of pride and accomplishment.
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There's very little point.
Unless you want to run 32-bit Windows or run in Test Signing Mode, most people aren't going to be able to run the kernel mode components of a self-built driver. (User mode components would still work with a few annoying warnings, but I'm not sure how much of what they're releasing is user mode and how much is kernel mode.)
Open source GPU is much closer now. (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps the greatest limiting factor in getting an open source GPU (source for firmware available) has always been implementing drivers and graphics libraries. Vulkan drastically reduced this requirement by creating a common platform for graphics libraries to execute on (see SPIR-V) and this can be a template for drivers. This leaves on two elements locked away: the firmware and the hardware itself. This is a massive reduction in labor for those who wish to bring an open source GPU to the market. It might not be the best/fastest GPU but it will be up to date and as functional as it's counterparts.
Drop means discontinue (Score:2)
Re: Drop means discontinue (Score:2)
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Come on -1, Funny moderation! We can do this!
AMD for the WIN! need ThreadRipper board with ipmi (Score:2)
AMD for the WIN! Now we need ThreadRipper boards with ipmi!!!
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so you need recent AMD hardware (GCN 1.2 and up), bleeding edge distro, and also use linux in the first place, and then find some application that use it
The Vulkan driver code supports back to SI (aka GCN 1.0), which launched in late 2011 and early 2012.
The code is for a userspace driver so just depends on having a suitably recent kernel driver & libdrm (already open source and already picked up by pretty much every distro on the planet). I would not call RHEL bleeding edge, although their kernel definitely has some newer bits than the base 3.10 version would suggest.
Re; having to use Linux in the first place along with an application that uses V
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Been using it awhile (Score:1)
RX480, 4GB. I've been using the FOSS drivers for about a year now and they're GREAT. I did have to compile my own kernel in the earlier days but now the ones that come with Ubuntu etc seem to work just fine out of the box.
great news (Score:2)
i actually like AMD, my first PC has an AMD processor and almost all replacements after that also were from AMD.
I've been using nvidia GPU's now on linux for so long, because the driver, even though closed, at least worked best. The last 2 years AMD has made so many improvements and has open source implementations that my next GPU probably will be AMD based.
At first Valve only supported nvidia for steam and steamos, but i think even they are now involved in improving the AMD oss drivers and a lot of games j
AMD SI/CIK GCN 1.x support in amdgpu is bad (Score:1)
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