AMDGPU-PRO 18.50 Linux Preview Driver Available For RHEL7, Begins Work On Navi

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDGPU-PRO 18.50 Linux Preview Driver Available For RHEL7, Begins Work On Navi

It turns out AMD quietly pushed out a public preview release of their upcoming Radeon Software 18.50 Linux driver (also referred to as AMDGPU-PRO 18.50). The public change-log is light, but there are references to the initial bring-up for next-generation Navi graphics...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-PRO-18.50-Preview

[gsedej]

Does rx 590 work?

[sireangelus]

It's so sad to see such a popular product(280x/7970) completely unsupported...

[moilami]

It's so sad to see such a popular product(280x/7970) completely unsupported...

They want to get your money for marginally better RX 580/590. Very glad there is Free Software, so that I don't have to bin my perfectly good 7970.

[tuxd3v]

It's so sad to see such a popular product(280x/7970) completely unsupported...

Its sad to see products like Rx580, not been supported for openCL workloads, on proprietary driver..
In the past they were supported...witouth the need of pcie atomics..

[humbug]

They want to get your money for marginally better RX 580/590. Very glad there is Free Software, so that I don't have to bin my perfectly good 7970.

I don't think that's it. On Windows GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 graphics cards are still very well supported in the drivers. Including Vulkan and DX12 performance which is much better than the rival Nvidia parts.

It's just that on Linux with a smaller team they have to allocate their manhours more selectively. I too am frustrated by some things like the fact that my R9 290 still defaults to the radeon kernel driver and the slower than windows vulkan drivers, but there is nothing malicious here. AMD is doing a great job here and the Linux drivers have been improving for years, which is why in 2018 we have great performance.

[StillStuckOnSI]

I don't think that's it. On Windows GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 graphics cards are still very well supported in the drivers. Including Vulkan and DX12 performance which is much better than the rival Nvidia parts.

It's just that on Linux with a smaller team they have to allocate their manhours more selectively. I too am frustrated by some things like the fact that my R9 290 still defaults to the radeon kernel driver and the slower than windows vulkan drivers, but there is nothing malicious here. AMD is doing a great job here and the Linux drivers have been improving for years, which is why in 2018 we have great performance.

As someone who owns a 280x and experienced the radeon/fglrx -> amdgpu/amdgpu-pro transition, the driver situation has undoubtedly improved (you can run RADV on GCN 1.0 cards, for one ).

That said, while the graphics side of things has improved drastically as part of this change in focus, compute has pretty much been left in the dust for older GPUs. Part of this is simply a technical thing, as gstoner, bridgman and others have given pretty thorough explanations of why the new ROCm stack isn't tenable for GCN 1.0. However, the fglrx -> amdgpu-pro switchover _also_ inexplicably dropped support for GCN 1.0. Thus, your only options for OpenCL support are:
a) reverting to kernel 3.x (!) and using fglrx, or
b) using clover/libclc and trying to make do with CL1.1

Now, I can understand why (from both a business and development perspective) there isn't much of an impetus to add support for Tahiti et al. to the new pro compute driver. That said, GCN 1.0 _can be_ made to work on the current "legacy" compute implementation. The bad news is that it requires a rather invasive and somewhat egregious workaround (see https://github.com/CNugteren/CLBlast/issues/301) that most libraries using OpenCL under the hood are unlikely to include. The whole situation is a tad frustrating, but as you said there probably not enough man-hours available to address this kind of lower-priority effort.

[moilami]

I don't think that's it. On Windows GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 graphics cards are still very well supported in the drivers. Including Vulkan and DX12 performance which is much better than the rival Nvidia parts.

It's just that on Linux with a smaller team they have to allocate their manhours more selectively. I too am frustrated by some things like the fact that my R9 290 still defaults to the radeon kernel driver and the slower than windows vulkan drivers, but there is nothing malicious here. AMD is doing a great job here and the Linux drivers have been improving for years, which is why in 2018 we have great performance.

I see, well, ok, I thought GCN 1.0 has been put under "legacy driver" on Windows.

And yes, AMD has been doing very good job with Linux drivers. That is why I might buy Vega 56 or next version of it.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Its sad to see products like Rx580, not been supported for openCL workloads, on proprietary driver..
In the past they were supported...witouth the need of pcie atomics..

May I inquire if you have a PCI-E 2.0 based Motherboard?

By the way it's also sad that their Debian packages hard require Ubuntu to install leaving us Debian folks willing to test the PRO stack SOL.

[tuxd3v]

May I inquire if you have a PCI-E 2.0 based Motherboard?

By the way it's also sad that their Debian packages hard require Ubuntu to install leaving us Debian folks willing to test the PRO stack SOL.

I own pcie2 and Pcie3.0 but without pcie atomic operations,
In older releases of AMDGPU-PRO, RX580 were supported, without pcie atomics.., maybe around 2016, but now MADGPU-PRO don't work, even on Ubuntu, without pcie atomics..

I still haven't tested this last release, but the previous ones, don't work.