It Looks Like We'll Still See A GUI Control Panel For AMD Linux

Earlier this year I exclusively reported on the "Radeon Settings" GUI control panel may be open-sourced for AMD Linux users but since then I hadn't heard anything publicly or privately about getting this graphics driver control panel on Linux for AMDGPU-PRO and the fully-open AMDGPU stack. But it looks like that it's still being worked on internally at AMD.

The Radeon Settings that AMD rolled out earlier this year to Windows users is written using Qt and is the successor to the Catalyst Control Center that had been present for many years. Under Linux, there is no good "GUI control panel" for the open-source drivers with options like DriConf being really dated and limited. With the old AMD proprietary stack there was AMDCCCLE, AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition, but since the premiere of AMDGPU-PRO there hasn't been any working GUI control panel there either. All the tunables for now are left to either hand-editing files, setting environment variables, and interacting with sysfs/debugfs manually to alter the driver's behavior.

Fortunately, we finally hear new information this week on the fate of having an AMD GUI control panel on Linux. From our veteran AMD Linux communicator, in the forums this week was the following comment: "Yep, there was some discussion of this a couple of months ago - porting CCC will become feasible, but all the plumbing needs to go into the driver first."

Great to see it's "feasible", but first they need to take care of all the prerequisites. This comment came after this week AMDGPU in Linux 4.10 will finally have RPM-based fan information via hwmon, a common attribute that is displayed via the control center on Windows and a common tunable/metric for enthusiasts/gamers. Hopefully we'll see the GUI driver control panel ported over to AMDGPU not too far into 2017.