Trying The New AMD GPU-PRO Linux Driver On Ubuntu With Vulkan, OpenCL & OpenGL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Trying The New AMD GPU-PRO Linux Driver On Ubuntu With Vulkan, OpenCL & OpenGL

On Friday night to much surprise, AMD published the beta version of their new hybrid Linux driver stack with Vulkan support alongside OpenCL, OpenGL, and VDPAU support. Here's some more details from my initial testing of this new driver that AMD is currently calling the Radeon Software AMD GPU-PRO Beta Driver for Linux.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22942

[varikonniemi]

Are they really going to leave GCN1 hardware out? I have such, and if it is already deprecated how could i recommend this brand to anyone?

[Daktyl198]

Are they really going to leave GCN1 hardware out? I have such, and if it is already deprecated how could i recommend this brand to anyone?

Fairly certain that they've mentioned (tentatively) that they were going to work backwards to include GCN 1.1 and 1.0 into the AMDGPU stack, but were focused on building the new drivers in the first place and including Vulkan.

[netkas]

Michael, try simpler workaround for kernel module compilation issue: use stock amdgpu kernel module.

I'm using a kernel you've compiled (4.5-rc3) with amdgpu enabled for CI and it works fine with rest of amdgpu-pro package, it even works better on 4k screen.

[Kemosabe]

Fairly certain that they've mentioned (tentatively) that they were going to work backwards to include GCN 1.1 and 1.0 into the AMDGPU stack, but were focused on building the new drivers in the first place and including Vulkan.

AFAIK radeon kernel module must die before this will happen. Kernel policy is 1 driver for 1 purpose. Never heard anybody mentioning this kind of plans remotely.

[rabcor]

have to admit, the vkcube demo segfaulting on the driver sounds kinda sad... talk about unstable driver...

[bridgman]

AFAIK radeon kernel module must die before this will happen. Kernel policy is 1 driver for 1 purpose. Never heard anybody mentioning this kind of plans remotely.

Yep, it's been discussed at great length. There are probably 500+ posts on it just here, where maybe 1/4 of those are from us.

Key points are (a) we started exploratory work on SI support a while back to see how it would go w.r.t. whether doing so would overcomplicate the code base or just make it bigger, (b) we have already discussed switching defaults with the upstream maintainer (airlied) and he is OK in principle as long as it's done with enough testing that existing users don't get broken.

[bridgman]

Curses, moderated again.

have to admit, the vkcube demo segfaulting on the driver sounds kinda sad... talk about unstable driver...

At first glance it sounds as if Michael was testing on a different distro config from us (at least that's how I interpreted his comment about installing 4.2 kernel on 14.04.4 LTS). If you download from the Ubuntu site you get 14.04.4 by default with the 4.2 kernel and associated gfx stack -- that's what we have been doing our testing with. Sounds like Michael might have been running an older 14.04 install that was updated to 14.04.4 in terms of bug / security fixes but still had older kernel & userspace.

With Ubuntu 15.10 and Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS using Linux 4.2, I just installed the generic mainline 4.2 kernel from the Ubuntu PPA and this AMD GPU-PRO beta driver installed then without any further problems.

Michael, am I reading your notes correctly ?

Then again, if Talos Principle ran OK it might be something on our side, will ask. Is anyone else running into problems with vkcube demo ?

[bpaterni]

Woot, turns out GPU-PRO does support opencl 2.0! My system may have just needed a reboot since clinfo was displaying only 1.2 last night(?) (ah, platform version is 2.0 -- devices are still at 1.2)

However it doesn't seem to be too fast yet as I'm seeing pauses after a few iterations (at least on the work I'm serving it)

gpu-pro does work for me on Debian unstable (Linux 4.4)... just needed to disable the check for ubuntu in amdgpu-pro-install

[CatMerc]

As I don't understand Linux drivers much, I can't really tell myself.

Does the userspace driver just released bring performance up to par with current Catalyst for AMDGPU?