AMD Overhauls Open-Source Linux Driver

An anonymous reader writes "AMD's open-source developer has posted an incredible set of 165 patches against the Linux kernel that provide support for a few major features to their Linux graphics driver. Namely, the open-source Radeon Linux driver now supports dynamic power management on hardware going back to the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) generation. The inability to re-clock the GPU frequencies and voltages dynamically based upon load has been a major limiting factor for open-source AMD users where laptops have been warm and there is diminished battery power. The patches also provide basic support for the AMD Radeon HD 8000 'Sea Islands' graphics processors on their open-source Linux driver."

Comments

Yay AMD

[Noishe]

This is a great step in the right direction. Hopefully it's not the last step.

Re:Yay AMD

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This is a great step in the right direction. Hopefully it's not the last step.

AMD's penurious financials do make me nervous; but their strategic change in favor of *gasp* actually working to integrate support for their product into the kernel development process proper seems to be sincere and ongoing. Slower moving than one would like; but since they began their course-change, they've kept it up.

Good guys AMD

[Reliable Windmill]

I'm excited about getting the upcoming Kaveri. APUs are the way to go unless you have needs that call for huge CPU or GPU power, and I think AMD is definitely leading the innovation here. It's a nice bonus if I will be able to run Linux with good graphics acceleration as well.

Re:Good guys AMD

[jkflying]

Personally, I'm excited about HUMA and what it will mean for scientific computing. The second half of this year will be exciting!

Re:Good guys AMD

[Belial6]

I have to agree. My son's laptop with an A10 processor beats both mine and my wife's laptops with i5. They all cost about the same amount. My laptop is fine for most tasks, but fails at gaming. My son's A10 handles every game he has tried without problem. There may be some that won't run well on it, but until we find one that doesn't, anything more would be wasted money.

Still not Stallman-approved.

[snarfies]

Per http://stallman.org/to-4chan.html:

"Regarding graphics accelerators for PCs, ATI mostly cooperates with the free software movement, while nVidia is totally hostile. ATI has released free drivers.

However, the ATI drivers use nonfree microcode blobs, whereas most of nVidia's products (excepting the most recent ones) work ok with Nouveau, which is entirely free and has no blobs.

Thus, paradoxically, if you want to be free you need to get a not-very-recent nVidia accelerator.

I wish ATI would free this microcode, or put it in ROM, so that we could endorse its products and stop preferring the products of a company that is no friend of ours."

This sort of thing gets discussed quite a bit on 4chan's technolo/g/y board. Also, installing Gentoo.

Re:Still not Stallman-approved.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Blobs are definitely not ideal; but I've never really understood the distinction between people who put them in ROM and people who require them to be loaded at initialization time(as long as they aren't assholes about redistribution: if Distro X is legally unable to distribute firmware.bin and I have to go to your site, download the Windows driver, and then chop it open to get firmware.bin, just to get an unaltered copy of your firmware to run with your device, I'm going to be pissed).

Both approaches involve exactly the same binary firmware blob, one just stores it on comparatively expensive, board-space-consuming, flash ROM and one stores it on system mass storage.

Firmware that is open is better than either; but closed firmware that is handled behind the curtain on the card seems no better than closed firmware that is supplied to the card during startup(again, assuming proper redistribution terms and proper driver support for that aspect of initializing the device).

Re:Still not Stallman-approved.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I don't understand why simply putting the closed source firmware on the card suddenly makes it ok for free software. Same code, just different home.

Re:Still not Stallman-approved.

[TubeSteak]

I don't understand why simply putting the closed source firmware on the card suddenly makes it ok for free software.

Licensing and distribution.

Anything that's in hardware has already dealt with the issues of licensing and distribution.
Closed source software represents and entirely different beast for free software distribution.

Re:Still not Stallman-approved.

[icebike]

The entire point of firmware being upgradable is that it is... well... upgradable. Not only that, but different versions of firmware may be required for different versions of software. This way it is much easier to ensure compatibility, because the driver has the firmware baked into it.

If it were firmware, I would be in agreement.

The objection to binary blobs, that are simply loaded into the device as firmware is sort of short sighted,
in that it punishes vendors that actually plan in a method of upgrading their products with new firmware.

But by and large, that isn't the issue here.
Far to many of these blobs are loaded loaded into main memory and run as a process under the operating system,
free to do just about anything.

If blobs were ONLY firmware, they could run ONLY on the device, and could be loaded once at installation time.
Very few fall into this category. (Some wifi chips do load this way upon every boot).

Far too many remain running in main memory.

Re:Still not Stallman-approved.

[LourensV]

I don't understand why simply putting the closed source firmware on the card suddenly makes it ok for free software. Same code, just different home.

Back in the days of the Open Graphics Project (since defunct, although Timothy N. Miller is still working in this area and the mailing list is still active for those interested in the subject), we had several discussions about the borders between Free software, open firmware, and open hardware.

As I understood the FSF's position at that time, the point is that if the firmware is stored on the host, it can be changed, and frequently is (i.e. firmware updates). Typically, the manufacturer has some sort of assembler/compiler tool to convert firmware written in a slightly higher level language to a binary that is loaded into the hardware, which then contains some simplistic CPU to run it (that's how OGD1 worked anyway). So, the firmware is really just specialised software, and for the whole thing to be Free, you should have access to the complete corresponding source code, plus the tools to compile it, or at least a description of the bitstream format so you can create those. This last part is then an instance of the general rule that for hardware to be Free software-friendly, all its programming interfaces should be completely documented.

If the code is put into ROM, it cannot be changed without physically changing the hardware (e.g. desoldering the chip and putting in another one). At that point, the FSF considers it immutable, and therefore not having the firmware source code doesn't restrict the user's freedom to change the firmware, since they don't have any anyway. The consequences are a bit funny in practice, as you noted, but it is (as always with the FSF) a very consistent position.

We (of the OGP-related Open Hardware Foundation, now also defunct; the whole thing was just a bit too ambitious and too far ahead of its time) argued that since hardware can be changed (i.e. you can desolder and replace that ROM), keeping the design a secret restricts the users freedom just as well. So, we should have open hardware, which would be completely (not just programming interfaces, but the whole design) documented and can therefore be changed/extended/repaired/parts-reused by the user. The FSF wasn't hostile to that idea, but considered it beyond their scope. Of course, any open hardware would automatically also be Free software-friendly.

I tend to agree that in practice, especially if there are no firmware updates forthcoming but it's just a cost-savings measure, loading the code from the host rather than from a ROM is a marginal issue. Strictly speaking though, I do think that the FSF have a point.

Thank God.

[intermodal]

My laptop ran ridiculously hot on the open-source until I got the closed-source drivers to install properly. Let's hope the fix means default installs of Ubuntu won't melt your igloo.

Side effect of console design wins?

[JDG1980]

I can't help but wonder if this is related to AMD's recent console design wins, especially PS4. Up until now, there hasn't really been a strong business case for putting a lot of effort into Unix-based video drivers. But since PS4 runs on FreeBSD and uses OpenGL as its API layer, a lot of the effort that AMD put into the drivers there can probably be ported over to the Linux drivers without much trouble. The PS4 and Xbone GPUs both use AMD's standard Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.

Re:Side effect of console design wins?

[gman003]

You don't really know what a development kit is, do you?

A devkit is not an SDK. It's the same hardware and software as the retail product, but with additions/modifications that enable debugging (adding debugging ports, using libraries with debug symbols, etc). They also get the ability to run "unlicensed" software, since you can't go to Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo every time you compile in order to have it certified. And, finally, early devkits may not have the final case/board, since launch titles need to start development well before the case or even motherboard are finished (famously, the early Xbox 360 devkits used Power Mac G5 cases and motherboards).

So if the devkit is running a FreeBSD kernel, the final product will be running a slightly different version of the same kernel.

Most likely pulled from your butt.

[Anonymous Coward]

NVidia tried that and made the mistake of saying who the IP that was the roadblock was: Sun. Sun Microsystems said "There is nothing that they have of ours that we would refuse to have open sourced". NVidia's response was to clam up and let the fanbois repeat the claim for ever more.

AMD Financials Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

$2B in debt, $1B cash, lost $600M last year, sales dropped 30% last year. They have no assets (spun off their manufacturing facilities). If the next gen consoles do not sell well because of casual / tablet gaming and potential Apple TV games, AMD will be bankrupt in one year and shuttering in two. Spending money on open source drivers is a long term investment - it's not going to get them an additional $600M in revenue next year (>2M additional graphics cards or >5M systemic wins) when PC sales are on the decline.

HUMA

[Anonymous Coward]

Hybrid Unified Memory Access.

Basically both your CPUs and GPUs having access to the same memory space without needing to 'swap' via apertures or anything else. It's currently intended for the gpu in APU packages, but I believe they've stated one of the next gen GPU platforms (HD9xxx?) is going to support it as well.