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Open Source Could Help Bring Vulkan To More AMD GPUs (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: AMD has confirmed that their Vulkan Linux driver will only work with the new AMDGPU kernel driver, meaning that for right now on the desktop, Vulkan will just work on the Radeon R9 285, R9 380, R9 380X and R9 Fury series — not even the other Rx 200/300 series graphics cards. This limitation exists because the AMDGPU driver only works with GCN 1.2 and newer. In time, AMD may allow the driver to work on older GCN GPUs going back to the HD 7000 series. But wait: AMDGPU is open-source. AMD is welcoming community support to help bring AMDGPU (and thereby Vulkan) to these older GPUs. The work involved would be porting GCN 1.0/1.1 support from the existing open-source Radeon DRM driver over to the new AMDGPU DRM driver. The Vulkan code itself is said to already be compatible with all GCN GPUs going back to the HD 7xxx series.
GCN 1.1 is missing nothing, so tell your Kaveri to be happy.
We already have upstream support for KV and the other GCN 1.1 parts in amdgpu, it's just not enabled by default yet, and can't be until the userspace has been available long enough to make sure we can cut over without new kernel builds breaking existing systems:
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu/Kconfig
The only question that's not fully settled is what we do for SI - extend the libdrm-amdgpu userspace library to use radeon kernel driver IOCTLs, or port the SI code from the radeon kernel driver to the amdgpu kernel driver. We have been looking at both options in parallel with developing the Vulkan userspace.