AMD Moves Forward With Unified Linux Driver Strategy, New Kernel Driver

[agd5f]

Older hardware will continue to be supported by the open source radeon and catalyst Linux drivers.

[dungeon]

Older hardware will continue to be supported by the open source radeon and catalyst Linux drivers.

For how long? I expect remaining fglrx r800 support will be droped let say this time or earlier next year, but according to this seems like GCN 1.0/1.1/1.2 will be droped too?

[agd5f]

For how long? I expect remaining fglrx r800 support will be droped let say this time or earlier next year, but according to this seems like GCN 1.0/1.1/1.2 will be droped too?

What makes you think that is the case? New chips will be supported with a new driver, older chips will continue to be supported with existing drivers just like before.

[dungeon]

What makes you think that is the case? New chips will be supported with a new driver, older chips will continue to be supported with existing drivers just like before.

Well question is about fglrx, 2006.>2009.>2012. are years where fglrx droped support for some older chips, so i expect in 2015. will be too because of around 3 years time frame in between .

So, i expect evergreen/NI support will go away next year, but this move makes me think all GCN 1.x will go away too

[pjezek]

What makes you think that is the case? New chips will be supported with a new driver, older chips will continue to be supported with existing drivers just like before.

You are right. Coexistence of old drivers for old cards wit the new driver for new cards has no sense thus one machine will live with drivers just made for it. Linux devs are fairly empathic to older HW users because that is *NIX philosophy...

[tuxd3v]

So if we buy a new AMDAPU
part with R5 or R7 does we will get support from this nnew AMD GPU driver??

regards
tux

[grndzro]

The new base driver model will use the opensource drivers alongside select bits of proprietary code. This should allow backwards compatibility.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgwODA

[dungeon]

So if we buy a new AMDAPU
part with R5 or R7 does we will get support from this nnew AMD GPU driver??

regards
tux

No, but if you ask this same question mid 2015. answer will be likely Yes.

Basically now we are talking about future , so if you want this not yet released amdgpu driver, look for GCN 1.2 or newer APUs once those are avaliable.