AMD Is Open-Sourcing Their Official Vulkan Linux Driver (phoronix.com)

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.

Comments

Re:They've done the impossible

[Wootery]

Pretty safe bet, now that Intel CPU + AMD GPU on a chip has been announced.

Re:He who controls the geeks controls the future

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[DrYak]

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.

Time has passed.

[DrYak]

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, 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).