AMD's New GPU Kernel Driver Could Be Too Late For Linux 3.19

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD's New GPU Kernel Driver Could Be Too Late For Linux 3.19

Red Hat's David Airlie as the Linux kernel's subsystem maintainer has written a status update about his plans and thoughts for DRM graphics driver changes for the next kernel cycle, Linux 3.19...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgyODg

[mmstick]

They can always get distributions like Ubuntu to ship a modified kernel that backports AMDGPU to a prior kernel release, much like Ubuntu 14.04's franken kernel.

[Yoshi]

I'm currently in that situation with my R285. Got it working with catalyst on my arch system but that was just a mess. I've hoped that it get's added to 3.19 though...

[xeekei]

3.19 was way earlier than I had thought anyway. So this is like crushing dreams I didn't know I had. Weird feeling. Like disappointment, but still happiness.

[R00KIE]

I'd say let it bake properly. IMHO it's better that the driver arrives a little later and everything (mostly) works properly out of the box than getting a rushed driver that doesn't work well. First impressions count and AMD should try to get this one right as they have a bad reputation regarding drivers.

[GreatEmerald]

Hm, but you can't have regressions in newly written code, by definition... And if it's all in experimental staging, I don't see how that would do anything to their reputation. If you're running that, you're crazy and it's all your fault anyway.

[wizard69]

I'd say let it bake properly. IMHO it's better that the driver arrives a little later and everything (mostly) works properly out of the box than getting a rushed driver that doesn't work well. First impressions count and AMD should try to get this one right as they have a bad reputation regarding drivers.

This is the thing, AMD has a lot riding on this, better to get it right. Not that it will be perfect out of the box but the infrastructure needs to be solid.

[bridgman]

Alex (agd5f) already responded about this :

No plans to merge amdgpu for 3.19.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2014-November/071304.html

[amethyst_igor]

This is the thing, AMD has a lot riding on this, better to get it right. Not that it will be perfect out of the box but the infrastructure needs to be solid.

I stopped buying AMD products back a couple years ago when I realized AMD didn't support Linux worth beans. Gradually I sold off every one of my AMD chips and motherboards. Now that I only buy and own Intel chips, I don't really care what AMD does or doesn't do, and I don't get to experience the wonderful world of Catalyst crashing my Linux. Intel is worth twice the price of AMD, because it has two lives: a Windows life and then a Linux life. It performs very well on both operating systems. AMD has to be half the price of an Intel chip to even be worth considering, but even then I probably wouldn't buy it because of the memories I have of struggling with the Catalyst video driver. So in reality, AMD has to be about one-hundredth the price of Intel or actually give away their chip before I would consider using one.

[mmstick]

I stopped buying AMD products back a couple years ago when I realized AMD didn't support Linux worth beans. Gradually I sold off every one of my AMD chips and motherboards. Now that I only buy and own Intel chips, I don't really care what AMD does or doesn't do, and I don't get to experience the wonderful world of Catalyst crashing my Linux. Intel is worth twice the price of AMD, because it has two lives: a Windows life and then a Linux life. It performs very well on both operating systems. AMD has to be half the price of an Intel chip to even be worth considering, but even then I probably wouldn't buy it because of the memories I have of struggling with the Catalyst video driver. So in reality, AMD has to be about one-hundredth the price of Intel or actually give away their chip before I would consider using one.

I've been using AMD's FOSS drivers on all of my AMD machines for two years now, and it runs perfectly. AMD started heavily investing into their open source drivers in the summer of last year. If you're still using Catalyst, you're doing it wrong. Not only is it buggy, but it gets less framerate and support than the open source Gallium3D drivers.