The Experimental GCN 1.0 GPU Support Might Be Dropped From AMDGPU Linux Driver

[kenjitamura]

This makes me question my tentative plans to buy AMD when my GeForce GTX750 dies.

Well if you do buy AMD just make sure whatever model you get is actually the newest iteration and not another one of their previous generation rebrands. It was ridiculous how long they kept pushing out GCN 1.0 and 1.1 parts after their initial release which makes them already dropping support for the 1.0 all the more cringeworthy.

[wizard69]

I’m not bothered by AMD considering dropping support. Eventually old hardware isn’t worth it. I do think however that they are operating under the mind set of an organization that is barely viable. You would hope that the success of ZEN would fix that.

what does bother me is not releasing enough information for community support of the hardware. I have no idea what the issues are but you would hope that AMD would resolve them.

[asdfgh]

Shame on AMD. Video decoding was created ages ago by a community member, all they need is to provide a firmware with proper headers.

Reading such news I don't see so much difference between AMD and Nvidia. Both require blobs. Both don't have FLOSS drivers.

[khnazile]

Now, when we have RDNA, they should drop GCN completely, not just 1.0 Why waste time on legacy architecture?

[Jedibeeftrix]

because i have a vega that i want to see continued support for.

you make this sound like my desire is controversial somehow...?

[Veto]

Just wondering: Why do we need a new firmware, if the existing firmware exposes the relevant interfaces on RadeonSI?

[entropy]

I definitely wouldn't want that.

My 7950 is still performing well.
Personally, I care about Vulkan support.

[anth]

The RX 520 is a GCN 1.0 part released in April 2017. It is OEM-only and I don't know if it is still available, or if not how long it was sold for.

[L_A_G]

As much as people are going to lament this decision, I can completely understand it. From what we've heard from the actual driver devs at AMD there seems to be a pretty huge amount of differences between early GCN hardware and more recent so it's not going to be as simple as them releasing the ISA documentation and the community taking care of the rest as there's a huge amount of separate code paths for older versions of GCN due to how heavily the ISA has changed since those original GCN cards from 7 years ago.

Try to remember that this isn't some separate driver, it's the exact same codebase that AMD themselves are working on to support everything from GCN 1.2 onward. The end result is that there would unavoidably be a whole lot of stepping on each others' proverbial toes. Only way this could work is if the community forks AMDGPU into a separate "AMDGPU-legacy" branch and if they can maintain it well enough, then distros could default to it rather than the old fglrx drivers they default to today.

Actually, come to think of it said community could just stop moaning do that without asking AMD for permission. We're not talking about proprietary code here and AMD doesn't do the incredibly annoying signature crap Nvidia does that doesn't achieve much beyond hobbling open source drivers.

[ThanosApostolou]

Really disappointing. I have an HD7750 since 2012 and I have the feeling that it was never supported properly on linux. First we had the broken fgrlx which was absolutely horrible but it had some use cases. Then it was dropped completely too soon leaving us with the really limited radeon kernel module and poor mesa support (at that time) leading to so many features not working and many gpu related crashes. Then again too soon they declared the radeon kernel module in maintenance mode and they told us that they focus completely on the new amdgpu kernel module and they "promised" us that they will backport it to GCN 1.0 at some point. I've tried the experimental support many times and I've given up on it due to many problems but I still use it just to be able to run some vulkan things at some times and I had the hope that the issues will be addressed in the future.

Bottom line, if they really had an old kernel module in good status that the community would be able to add vulkan support and other things on it in the future then I would be ok with it. I think that I remember mesa developers saying that they stopped working on features for the drivers related to the radeon kernel module path, using the argument that even GCN 1.0 GPUs will be using amdgpu soon anyway. So, because of the drivers' mess amd has made in the past years, I believe they owe us to at least try and fix the amdgpu for GCN 1.0.