AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Amassing Improvements For Linux 5.8

[amdtesterman]

Dammit...

My OCD makes me have to point that out.

shit, sorry for that

[Tuxee]

have you tested manjaro? its the best distro nowadays I think for newest gpu's ( amd and intel) and it is not only mesa and kernel, sometimes is the firmware too.

Ah, the firmware... already been down that road, too. Best firmware files are the ones back from November. Recent updates exhibited problems again.

[amdtesterman]

Ah, the firmware... already been down that road, too. Best firmware files are the ones back from November. Recent updates exhibited problems again.

I feel that the latest firmware is making my laptop be more power hungy (+0.5W) for example, but less freezes

[MadeUpName]

I think AMD needs to do something about their OpenCL situation, so kinda is their own fault for letting it languish this long. Intel made some precedence with Beignet that AMD decided to follow suit with and abandoned clover in favor of ROCm. Except that ROCm is taking this long and breaks badly. In exactly the same way that Beignet got abandoned, I'm reasonably certain AMD is gonna have to abandon ROCm.

AMD is so close to having things working with ROCm but yes it does look like they re going to abandon it for a different approach, yet again. Attention deficit disorder is killing AMD on Linux. If they aren't ever going to complete a project why start any at all? The kernel parts of ROCm just got put into the kernel and will sooner rather than later have to be pulled out again. What a complete waste of time and effort.

[castlefox]

Can someone please explain what these items mean? I have been using Linux for a while now but I have no idea what these items mean.

- A new firmware share memory support mode for VCN.
- Enabling support for IH rings 1 and 2 with Navi.
- Updating SPM golden settings for Navi 10 / 12 / 14.

[agd5f]

- A new firmware share memory support mode for VCN.

This is part of the dynamic powergating support for VCN 2.5.

- Enabling support for IH rings 1 and 2 with Navi.

The IH (interrupt handler) hardware allows the driver to redirect certain interrupts to secondary queues to avoid overflowing the primary for large numbers of interrupts. This isn't actually used for navi, this code just happens to be shared with arcturus.

- Updating SPM golden settings for Navi 10 / 12 / 14.

Golden settings are optimal settings defined by the hardware team. SPM are streaming performance monitors. They are not used unless you are using perf counters for profiling a workload.

[tuxd3v]

because fah doesn't support amd, so nobody bothers to use fah

the problem is a lot more deep than that..
Rocm only Supports cards with pcie3 atomic operations between CPU/GPU/spliters/risers, etc, everything needs support pcie atomic operations..

If you don't have that support in some of your connections on motherboard, you are done, no Rocm, only one fail, and you are done!!

Nvidia can even run opencl/Cuda in pcie1.1, so you can see why people use Nvidia....it works!!

[Naquatis]

What is AMD doing wrong on Linux?
Linux users are going with Nvidia instead of AMD, despite AMD having open source code drivers.

According to the Folding@home stats, Nvidia is 16x more popular than AMD on Linux. Nvidia is more popular than AMD on Windows too, but by not such a big margin as on Linux.

AMDs own PAL OpenCL implementation crashing all the time while Mesa OpenCL did not even reach V 1.2. As testcase AMD GPU is nearly useless when it comes to render stuff in Blender Cycles. So everybody buy an RTX and use optix .. simple as that. Damn why I bought an RX 5700 XT? That was the most silly action ever!

By the way ROCm was useless from the beginning. AMD simply failed while not getting a stable OpenCL 1.2 and above into Mesa.

[pal666]

the problem is a lot more deep than that..
Rocm only Supports cards with pcie3 atomic operations between CPU/GPU/spliters/risers, etc, everything needs support pcie atomic operations..

If you don't have that support in some of your connections on motherboard, you are done, no Rocm, only one fail, and you are done!!

Nvidia can even run opencl/Cuda in pcie1.1, so you can see why people use Nvidia....it works!!

first, i don't care how fah will support amd, they could use something other than rocm. second, on non-broken modern hardware pcie3 atomics just work

[pal666]

"Half the time" means you and/or your distro were doing it wrong, or you're greatly exaggerating.

"more than zero" is unacceptable