Linux 4.17 To Enable AMDGPU DC By Default For All Supported GPUs

[duby229]

Yep, AMD is certainly now the GPU brand to recommend for the vast majority of Linux use cases. Things just work easier and are well integrated with Linux. No need to tinker with manually downloading and installing nvidia blobs.

Plus the engagement we see from their devs answering questions on forums + reddit etc and the synergy we see between them and the external development community including folks from Red Hat, Valve and the public... That spirit of collaboration is just more aligned with the Linux philosophy than Nvidia is.

When I purchased my R9 290 years ago things were different. Performance was bad for AMD on Linux. I don't know how (maybe it was the formation of RTG) but they have really turned things around as far as Linux goes. Now we see continuous improvements on performance and features.

That's not true at all. The open source drivers already performed fantastic at that point. It was just simply that when Hawaii got launched the open source support was still incomplete. But at that same time you could very easily have chosen a 280 or a 7870 and had near flawless performance.

EDIT: The fact is that radeonsi performed incredible from it's first day. The winsys and state trackers were derived from R600g and performed nearly flawless from the first day, GLAMOR already existed and performed decent-ish, and the new radeon LLVM compiler was performing basically as good as the hardware was cabable of. You just jumped on new hardware too soon.

[ermo]

Is it reasonable to expect the DC code-base to grow support for GCN 1.0 during 2018?

Or are there issues (hardware bugs) that make this a non-starter?

[nanonyme]

Is it reasonable to expect the DC code-base to grow support for GCN 1.0 during 2018?

Or are there issues (hardware bugs) that make this a non-starter?

There's also the sales point of view. GCN1.0 is pretty old and that hardware is getting less and less likely to be sold so unless DC makes maintenance significantly simpler, it might be hard to justify spending developer time on that

[Brisse]

Strange how it works for me then

[pete@com1 ~]$ DISPLAY=:0 xrandr --prop|grep freesync
freesync_capable: 1
freesync: 1

Morbis55 radeon-profile shows if you have it/enabled or not

It doesn't ACTUALLY work even if this flag is set to enabled. I am able to verify this because my monitor OSD is capable to show me the refresh rate as it changes in "real time", and on Linux it doesn't change at all despite xrandr reporting Freesync enabled. If you been following Phoronix news articles you would have seen that AMD developers are currently working with upstream developers to come to some vendor neutral solution to implement adaptive refresh rate in drivers and user space, but it's not finished and will probably take months, if not years before we see a working upstreamed implementation. Until then, AMDGPU-PRO is the only way to do Freesync on Linux and it is very limited in it's functionality compared to Freesync on Windows. Pretty much useless to be honest.

[zzarko]

OK, I have been reading driver stuff for a long time, and I'm still not sure what is the recommended option for Radeon 7950 (Tahiti, GCN 1.0) nowdays. I'm still on Ubuntu 14 64bit just for fglrx and its game support. I play a lot of Steam/GOG Linux games, even the more recent ones play just fine on HD resolution (at least for me). My setup is also very stable, I don't turn off my computer for weeks (but it goes to sleep mode when I'm not using it).

If I'm to install a newer distribution with new kernel, which driver should I use (again: gaming is a must! ), so that I don't lose support for the games that simply just work in my current setup? Or should I stay with older kernel/xorg and fglrx?

[Jumbotron]

I don't think so, since it comes with 4.15 kernel. Probably after next upgrade (18.04.1 or 18.04.2)

Thanks. I put on my Dunce cap and sat in the corner after I realized I said 18.04. Hopefully by 18.10 !

[Jumbotron]

I would say that enabling DC by default in amdgpu is a pre-requisite for enabling amdgpu by default - don't think it would make sense for them to happen together. At this point Mr Cooper usually reminds me about the other pre-requisite I'm forgetting...

Once again, thanks Bridgman for the info. As I told someone else, I felt a little foolish when I saw I referenced 18.04 and tied it to DC. As the poster said perhaps by 18.04.1 or 2 or perhaps in my hope 18.10.

Either way, a hearty mug of brew for all you and the AMD Linux team are doing for us !

[juno]

Hmm, will be interesting to see how many will disable the default setting now...

[pete910]

It doesn't ACTUALLY work even if this flag is set to enabled. I am able to verify this because my monitor OSD is capable to show me the refresh rate as it changes in "real time", and on Linux it doesn't change at all despite xrandr reporting Freesync enabled. If you been following Phoronix news articles you would have seen that AMD developers are currently working with upstream developers to come to some vendor neutral solution to implement adaptive refresh rate in drivers and user space, but it's not finished and will probably take months, if not years before we see a working upstreamed implementation. Until then, AMDGPU-PRO is the only way to do Freesync on Linux and it is very limited in it's functionality compared to Freesync on Windows. Pretty much useless to be honest.

My monitor also reports is active too when enabled. It works in game too if you have the framerate caped to the monitors refresh/freesync rate

http://downloads.unrealnetworks.co.uk/fs-active.jpg

What do you mean by limited to windows, Used on both all though not much on windows if am honest ?

Just thought am on AMD staging ! guess there,s still a fair difference between that and what's in mainline branch!

[wizard69]

First let me say that the reason i have an HPX360 with an AMD chip is the confidence i got from seeing the vastly improved Linux support and interaction from AMD. I really believe this bleeding edge hardware will be suitable for primary Linux use in a few months.

Right now im testing Ubuntu from a USB stick and must say im impressed even if there are still significant issues. One big one is an apparent inability to resume from low power mode. In other words closing the lid and then reopening it some time latter leads to a crash.

The efforts are laudable and for gaming or HTPC use, amdgpu is certainly useable by now.

Interestingly i have little interest in gaming but may do a HTPC at sometime in the future. What drew me to this laptop though was the GPU and CPUs which in combo represents a very powerful platform. The fact that AMD has demonstrated a commitment to GPU drivers in linux sealed the deal so to speak.

Are the drivers perfect - certainly not however they are better than anything before and get better literally weekly. I don't expect instant perfection, i just want to see a commitment to things getting better over time.

But for any use case where uptimes longer than a few days are of importance: No way I could recommend amdgpu, yet. There are just way too frequent spontaneous crashes, even when doing completely mundane stuff (like typing text into a web form :-( ).

on the other hand if nobody uses the drivers they will never get better. No body likes crashes but unused software never crashes. You need to also consider that AMD hardware in the likes of Raven Ridge didn't work at all a few weeks ago.

For the hardware I use for work, Intel's integrated GPUs are currently the only stable option I know.

Intel does a very good job with open source. The only real problem is the poor GPU performance. I can get by with moderately good 3D performance doing light CAD and 3D work, AMD delivers that in their hardware. Yeah software could use some improvements but it is already vastly improved.

I might also suggest that in the case of the hardware im running MS isn't all that far ahead. In the 3 months ive had this machine I've seen significant updates on basically a weekly schedule. I actually prefer to see Linux getting the attention even if driver improvements are still neded.