AMD Is Hiring Two More Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Developers

[Kayden]

AMD's open source drivers are very nice but with all the new technologies coming out and intel basically not contributing to mesa anymore, their current devs will just never catch up.

(disclaimer: this is a personal effort, not relating to my employer - I read too many phoronix comments and decided to get some facts)

A while back, I configured gitdm to work with Mesa - gitdm is the software Jonathan Corbet uses to generate kernel commit statistics. Over the last year (git log --since 2014-03-01 -p -M | gitdm -c .gitdm/gitdm.config), these were the top 10 companies by number of commits:

Top changeset contributors by employer

     1  Intel                     2968 (40.3%)
     2  Independent               1499 (20.4%)
     3  VMware                     739 (10.0%)
     4  AMD                        708 (9.6%)
     5  Broadcom                   489 (6.6%)
     6  Red Hat                    383 (5.2%)
     7  LunarG                     298 (4.0%)
     8  Igalia                     190 (2.6%)
     9  Google                      23 (0.3%)
    10  IBM                         22 (0.3%)

For comparison, here are the top 10 committers:

Developers with the most changesets

     1  Matt Turner                731 (9.9%)
     2  Eric Anholt                583 (7.9%)
     3  Kenneth Graunke            555 (7.5%)
     4  Marek Ol??k                490 (6.7%)
     5  Emil Velikov               472 (6.4%)
     6  Brian Paul                 447 (6.1%)
     7  Ilia Mirkin                377 (5.1%)
     8  Jason Ekstrand             352 (4.8%)
     9  Chia-I Wu                  289 (3.9%)
    10  Rob Clark                  248 (3.4%)

I'm happy to make corrections to my configuration files (linked above) - I tried pretty hard to get everyone's email aliases and employment dates correct, but there will inevitably be some mistakes. I was actually encouraged to see how much independent Mesa development still happens. I definitely applaud AMD for investing more in free software graphics - there's certainly no shortage of work for everyone involved.

[smitty3268]

Perhaps you have some feedback on where the nvc0 driver falls short? Note that you don't get to complain about low fps due to low clock speeds -- that's well outside the purvue of the mesa driver and has absolutely nothing to do with "quality of implementation". [However by all means complain about low fps when comparing clock-for-clock to a different implementation.]

To the best of my knowledge, it renders everything correctly, and doesn't require funny (read: pre-release) versions of llvm to work properly with new titles. There is the occasional bug every so often... e.g. there are 2 that I'm aware of now, but they affect very few titles (1 each as far as I know). On mesa-git, it's ahead of radeonsi with ARB_gpu_shader5, ARB_gpu_shader_fp64, ARB_texture_view, ARB_viewport_array, and a couple of less important extensions. Only fp64 was added in this release cycle, some of the other ones go back as far as 10.2.

I was speaking of the driver in general, which absolutely includes clock speeds. Waving your arms and saying that doesn't count just because the code is in a different repository doesn't mean anything.

It's also not exactly fair to only look at a single generation - why only look at nvc0 and not nv50, for example?

And while those extra extensions are nice, they fall squarely into the "not really that useful yet" area for me - at least until full GL4 is exposed.

[smitty3268]

(disclaimer: this is a personal effort, not relating to my employer - I read too many phoronix comments and decided to get some facts)

A while back, I configured gitdm to work with Mesa - gitdm is the software Jonathan Corbet uses to generate kernel commit statistics. Over the last year (git log --since 2014-03-01 -p -M | gitdm -c .gitdm/gitdm.config), these were the top 10 companies by number of commits:

I'm happy to make corrections to my configuration files (linked above) - I tried pretty hard to get everyone's email aliases and employment dates correct, but there will inevitably be some mistakes. I was actually encouraged to see how much independent Mesa development still happens. I definitely applaud AMD for investing more in free software graphics - there's certainly no shortage of work for everyone involved.

It would be interesting to limit those stats to just the common, shared parts of mesa - so excluding the intel driver specific bits, just like it doesn't include the llvm driver bits from amd.

That said, whoever complained that Intel isn't working on Mesa anymore has no idea what they're talking about.

[bridgman]

I was speaking of the driver in general, which absolutely includes clock speeds. Waving your arms and saying that doesn't count just because the code is in a different repository doesn't mean anything.

It's also not exactly fair to only look at a single generation - why only look at nvc0 and not nv50, for example?

The first post from uid313 was talking specifically about the nvc0 pipe driver (like talking about radeonsi) and progress relative to the OpenGL feature matrix rather than the entire nouveau stack & overall user experience, but the tone of the post suggested that it was talking about the entire stack and particularly the bits where vendor assistance makes the most difference.

Any further discussion was doomed

[justmy2cents]

Graphics engines had always OGL, never used. Companies had always OGL renderers for many of their games like on PS3-PS4-OSX, but not Linux. They had Unix-Posix integration like on PS4-OSX, but not Linux. The OGL renderer was missing even from Windowz as choice. As they say in my country: "is not important what they will do, its only important what you will do". Compatibility layer is not emulation, its the ultimate user software.

times are changing. in one year almost linux got up to almost 1000 games. also, the reason why engines didn't support it by default:
- posix is the least of trouble when porting. engine would be biggest one, while middleware is close second
- ps3 runs PSGL, not OpenGL (and do check what PSGL is)
- ps4 doesn't run any kind of GL at all
- OSX now barely holds any advantage in number of games compared to linux. and most games on OSX are not developed by original developer but rather ported after the fact by companies like Aspyr or Feral, same as linux now
- engines were expensive and linux way less popular, so some engines didn't support it for numbers and smaller engines couldn't afford to support it
- GL was a mess that is hard to support due to driver and implementation differences, where directx was much easier target. even now you have NVidia at 4.5, amd at 4.4, Mesa at 3.3, OSX at 4.1. then, there are performance differences. something running awesome on one vendor might run like crap on another. not to mention GL on mobile is GL ES, so you can't have one one source for both and optimized at the same time
- GLSL shaders had to be deployed in source, which most developers didn't like it
- GL are complex drivers, this is why mesa has hard time keeping up
- not to mention ms claiming they wont support gl and longpeak fiasco.
- also, which engines did have GL? only ones that had it were ID and latest UE3 (where UE3 development didn't really work well for backporting)

vulkan is addressing all those problems and all big engines already pledged to provide support.

keep your ultimate user software. at best i see it as last resort which should be avoided if possible. if i (and probably many people who run linux) wanted to run windows software, i go and buy windows instead running it crippled

[imirkin]

I was speaking of the driver in general, which absolutely includes clock speeds. Waving your arms and saying that doesn't count just because the code is in a different repository doesn't mean anything.

The comments made it sound as if nouveau drivers don't work. My point is -- they usually work just fine. You just don't get the full performance of the card. But you do get correct rendering, and the various features are supported to spec.

It's also not exactly fair to only look at a single generation - why only look at nvc0 and not nv50, for example?

Glad you brought it up. All of the hardware features of nv50 are supported. Probably a couple more extensions that it will get when they make it into mesa. And those cards tended to boot into higher clock modes, *and* a bunch of them have reclocking support now (GT21x's). Neat, huh?

And while those extra extensions are nice, they fall squarely into the "not really that useful yet" area for me - at least until full GL4 is exposed.

Perhaps reconsider your position then -- gs5 and fp64 are part of GL4, and viewports are GL4.1. If you care about GL4, you care about those extensions, otherwise no GL4. See http://people.freedesktop.org/~imirk...o/glxinfo.html

[baffledmollusc]

Since these threads are full of people complaining, let me state for the record:

Kayden: I appreciate the huge amount of work you guys have done and are doing for mesa.

Bridgman: The fact that AMD is pursuing open drivers and diverting resources to do so gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. I appreciate it, and buy AMD cards because of it.

Ilia: The work you've done with Nouveau driver is hugely impressive, especially given the lack of support from Nvidia. Much appreciated.

I love you all!

[Hamish Wilson]

Native Linux games usually use only closed GL drivers that are not free technology and they don't help the community anywhere.

As someone who games exclusively using the free software radeon drivers on Linux, I have never seen so much bullshit in one statement in my entire life.

[jaxxed]

Since these threads are full of people complaining, let me state for the record:

Kayden: I appreciate the huge amount of work you guys have done and are doing for mesa.

Bridgman: The fact that AMD is pursuing open drivers and diverting resources to do so gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. I appreciate it, and buy AMD cards because of it.

Ilia: The work you've done with Nouveau driver is hugely impressive, especially given the lack of support from Nvidia. Much appreciated.

I love you all!

I second that. Not only great work, but nice to see communication and contribution in forums like this.

[Khudsa]

Since these threads are full of people complaining, let me state for the record:

Kayden: I appreciate the huge amount of work you guys have done and are doing for mesa.

Bridgman: The fact that AMD is pursuing open drivers and diverting resources to do so gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. I appreciate it, and buy AMD cards because of it.

Ilia: The work you've done with Nouveau driver is hugely impressive, especially given the lack of support from Nvidia. Much appreciated.

I love you all!

I second this too. They do a great work and always here giving explanations.