AMD Admits It Has Linux Problems

AMD admits it has had some Linux support problems with its graphics drivers and they'll be working to improve the situation.

In particular, AMD concedes it has the most problems with OpenCL support on Linux. They attribute their Linux problems to the fact that there's many Linux distributions out there rather than just a single platform like Microsoft Windows.

Our friends at The Inquirer have the scoop this morning in an article entitled AMD admits it has to work on improving Linux OpenCL support. Here's a few random notes from the article:

- Neal Robinson, Senior Director of Consumer Developer Support at AMD, outright says they have more work to do in the Linux space. He adds that it's "more complex" due to different Linux distributions.

- AMD's sponsoring some open-source projects like the GIMP, x264, Handbrake, VLC, and FFmpeg to better adopt OpenCL in their code. This has been previously talked about on Phoronix in AMD's Paying For Some Open-Source OpenCL Love.

- On workstation pre-loads from tier-one vendors like Dell, when shipping with AMD graphics they haven't been enabling GPGPU (OpenCL) support when using Linux. On the same systems with Windows, the pre-load includes GPGPU support.

Let's see what AMD will do to improve the Linux support situation... This month they are canning the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series support, but besides that, Catalyst 12.5 should be good.