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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.
Maybe AMD has understood that if you have the geeks on your side, than the next generation of general consumers will be yours as well. Because nobody, except the geeks, can tell two brands of hardware apart but everybody ask their geek family member for advice
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Nvidia and firmware makers tell us it's impossible because of 3rd party, security, competitive edge and a whole bunch of what now looks like excuses. I would love to hear from all the nay sayers how it was made possible ;)
well done, I hope system makers start making intel CPU with AMD GPU (sorry not meant as a back hand compliment)
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Perhaps the greatest limiting factor in getting an open source GPU (source for firmware available) has always been implementing drivers and graphics libraries. Vulkan drastically reduced this requirement by creating a common platform for graphics libraries to execute on (see SPIR-V) and this can be a template for drivers. This leaves on two elements locked away: the firmware and the hardware itself. This is a massive reduction in labor for those who wish to bring an open source GPU to the market. It might not be the best/fastest GPU but it will be up to date and as functional as it's counterparts.
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