Slashdot Mirror
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.
Uhhh...did you bother to read TFA? AMD has ASKED the community for help, given them the code, which is exactly what the community asked for in the first place and...nothing.
So its kinda hypocritical to bitch when the community has got the code and just haven't gotten it done yet. Maybe they are having issues, maybe they are too busy dealing with the SystemD debacle, who knows, but the community asked for code and they got it so the ball is in their court now.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The first is that writing a graphics driver is REALLY HARD. I think a lot of the people who were complaining and asking didn't really understand the magnitude of what they were talking about. They were people who'd maybe messed around with a network driver or something and said "Huh, drivers aren't that bad." Graphics drivers are ENORMOUS things, exceedingly complex. Lots and lots and lots of code that interacts with a lot of stuff in different ways. I mean the GPU is literally a little computer in many respects. Also GPUs change fast. New generations come out every 2 years or so and are often radically different architectures with tons of new features. So you have continual new work to do. It isn't like a NIC or RAID controller where 95%+ of the features might be copy-paste from the previous gen. I don't think a lot of people understood just how big an undertaking a GPU driver is.
The second is that I think people forget there's a REASON the drivers are closed source and that is they make use of licensed code that cannot be open sourced. Well guess what? That code gets licensed for a reason. It makes developing this stuff easier, more feasible. You don't have that as an OSS developer, of course, so your life is going to be more difficult. I think there is a perception that the closed source drivers are closed "just because" or that the licensed code in them could be ripped out and replaced easily. No, not so much it seems. There's a reason for it.