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AMD Publishes Preview Linux Hybrid Driver With Vulkan, OpenGL 4.5 Support (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: AMD has finally published the previously talked about closed-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux. Announced by AMD via the Phoronix Forums is the new hybrid driver dubbed "AMD GPU-PRO Beta Driver – Linux." This closed-source user-space driver provides the first AMD Vulkan support on Linux along with OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 2.0, and VDPAU video acceleration capabilities. But in using the open-source AMDGPU kernel driver, only the very latest AMD GPUs are currently supported (GCN 1.2+). Update: 03/19 03:22 GMT by T : Sorry for the borked link; now fixed.
I would actually like some transparency from AMD for your second point. They are using a third party developer? Or maybe third party tools? I can see that maybe 5 years ago.
Nope, all in-house developers. The issue with opening up the remaining bits (at least OpenCL and Vulkan) is that the drivers are cross-OS and include a lot of OS-specific bits (for other OSes than Linux) that we don't have the right to expose publicly. Opening up the code basically involves turning them into Linux-specific drivers, typically making the OS-independent bits smaller but removing any proprietary abstractions that might have been there before, eg rewriting anything that happened to use Windows or MacOS abstractions in the common code.
As the experts for their own hardware I would expect them to hire/contract a platform expert and make their own infrastructure which would be equally open source. Publicize the developers name and simply point to him and we can rake him over the coals.
Seriously, adding *one* person isn't going to even scratch the surface. Adding 20 people maybe... we're talking about 10,000+ KSLOC of code just for OpenGL.