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

[mzs.112000]

Thanks for the feedback that it works well with your hardware.
Is that also true for vulkan games in general? wine?
What CPU/APU does your laptop have?
My old laptop had an APU with NI graphics (A10-5750M/HD 8650G) + an 8670M so i didn't think amdgpu was an option for me, but maybe that combo works now?

My laptop is a Dell E6540, has Intel i7-4800MQ and a 8790M. I am using AMDGPU GCN 1.0 support right now.

I'm thinking about getting a 2015 MacBook Pro eventually, it's also got a GCN 1.0 GPU.

[starshipeleven]

What decision are you talking about ?

The only "decisions" I am aware of are (a) Christian deciding to make a casual comment on a mailing list about the *possibility* of retiring amdgpu support for SI parts if we couldn't get the video working and (b) Michael deciding to turn that comment into an article.

No decisions have been made about amdgpu... everyone seems to be reacting to other people's comments rather than reacting to the article.

I guess that's the "internet echo chamber" thing everyone talks about

BTW the article talks about "AMD is unlikely to release" firmware to let UVD work with amdgpu, but that is kind of misleading since it implies that the firmware exists to release. The reality is that the firmware does not exist and does not seem to be feasible due to code size limitations.

The only post worth reading in the whole thread. Thanks for clearing that up.

[agd5f]

As has been stated every time UVD and VCE on SI parts gets brought up, you can use the same firmware from radeon with amdgpu. The only difference is you need to rearrange to the internal address space so that vram is put at 0 in the internal address space the same way radeon does it. The only downside to that is that SI would be an outlier because we use the same memory config on all the other asics. The only reason we brought up new firmware at the time was because it would have been nice to use the same memory layout for all asics supported by amdgpu. It's not a hard requirement. There's no secret information required; there is already working support available in radeon that can be used as a guide. It's just a matter of porting the code. The driver is open source. Patches are welcome. If some one wanted to port the UVD support from radeon to amdgpu, we'd certainly help review the patches. radeon is a fully featured driver that the supports all the functionality of the asic. Someone could also add support for radeon to vulkan rather than porting the remaining features from radeon to amdgpu.

[bridgman]

As has been stated every time UVD and VCE on SI parts gets brought up, you can use the same firmware from radeon with amdgpu. The only difference is you need to rearrange to the internal address space so that vram is put at 0 in the internal address space the same way radeon does it.

Yep, I should have mentioned that.

It seems like we are saying this all the time but I guess it might have been a year since the last time it came up. Thanks !

[duby229]

As has been stated every time UVD and VCE on SI parts gets brought up, you can use the same firmware from radeon with amdgpu. The only difference is you need to rearrange to the internal address space so that vram is put at 0 in the internal address space the same way radeon does it. The only downside to that is that SI would be an outlier because we use the same memory config on all the other asics. The only reason we brought up new firmware at the time was because it would have been nice to use the same memory layout for all asics supported by amdgpu. It's not a hard requirement. There's no secret information required; there is already working support available in radeon that can be used as a guide. It's just a matter of porting the code. The driver is open source. Patches are welcome. If some one wanted to port the UVD support from radeon to amdgpu, we'd certainly help review the patches. radeon is a fully featured driver that the supports all the functionality of the asic. Someone could also add support for radeon to vulkan rather than porting the remaining features from radeon to amdgpu.

My understanding is something like in order to get vulkan working on radeon, then amdgpu's winsys needs to be ported to radeon and that seems way too difficult. If it's so simple to get UVD working by rearranging address spaces for GCN1 on amdgpu, that's obviously the simpler option than porting amdgpu's winsys to radeon.

[Teggs]

From an end-user perspective, the idea that Vulkan support which has existed for a couple of years now would go away is just disgusting.

This is what the cards were designed for: Mantle (Vulkan/DirectX 12). Graphics Core Next. Take away the Next and what do you have? A reason to upgrade? Or a reason to distrust what AMD is saying about their current products?

[Guest]

With such a move they would discredit their hard earned reputation of driver support in the Linux community. I don't know how much ressources supporting GCN 1.0/1.1 costs in AMDGPU, or releasing the needed UVD firmware, but dropping support comes with a cost, too. The reactions here are quite telling (and as I also own a HD7850 in a legacy system, rightfully so!).

They never had good driver support in the first place. I appreciate the fact that they provide upstreamed open source drivers, but their driver quality has been shit ever since the beginning. They really need to work on improving that.

[Guest]

AMD up to their old shenanigans again just like the did with fglrx and sub HD5000, had my fingers burnt once and just as I was thinking about AMD once more they go and do it all over again. Sorry AMD but I just don't trust your support length, need to do better.

After being an AMD fanboy for several years, and having been burned several times and at length, I'm just sick of it. Once Intel launches their Xe dGPU, I'm just jumping ship.

[Guest]

I just put an R7 240 in my camera server at work, so this is a huge bummer. Now I have to keep my kernel/xorg/mesa/libdrm frozen just to maintain AMDGPU working (which was not fun to set up).

Probably Ubuntu LTS or Debian, with the latest kernel version that supports your GPU? I hear they're great at providing old and outdated software to people.

[SkyWarrior]

This support should have been out of experimental stage already. Plain stupid to remove a supported hardware that is already capable of doing lots of things right.

Heck even less capable HD 4000 from IVB era received vulkan support under linux which is nonexistent under windows and still kicking. There are still many good laptops in use with haswell iGPU and AMD CIK or SI dGPU. Those systems don't care about UVD since video playback on desktop is pretty much taken care of by iGPU.