Radeon "Southern Islands" Support Continues Improving In AMDGPU Driver - GPU Reset

[Guest]

Don't forget DisplayPort AdaptiveSync support! That's also an AMDGPU only feature.

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Well, back in 2012 AMD closed their OpenSource Technology Research Center in Germany, Dresden:

https://www.golem.de/news/osrc-amd-schliesst-dresdner-open-source-abteilung-1211-95574.html

Fortunately time has changed a bit, still it's a pitty they fired many (25) talented people working on XEN, the Linux kernel and the likes. >.<

[ms178]

Don't forget DisplayPort AdaptiveSync support! That's also an AMDGPU only feature.

As far as I remember there is only limited support for this on GCN 1.1 and it is unavailable on GCN 1.0.

[piotrj3]

This is exactly what adds value to the AMD brand over others, when existing products aren't cursed by their manufacturer with "planned obsolescence upgrades", "driver upgrades that screw up everything", or other anti-consumer behaviors like "Oh you need the old broken driver we don't maintain anymore -- you're not a poor user are you?".

Maybe wrecking my old GPUs has no effect on my buying decisions because I upgrade every ~2 generations anyways and would like my old GPUs to go to extra machines to play Xonotic or other old games or friends and family who can't afford new GPUs or simply wouldn't buy one themselves. Fuck me right?

The long game is while Nvidia cards gradually turn to dogshit AMD won't -- what does that say about Brand Value / Reputation in the eyes of consumers. A lot.

Excuse me what? AMD doesnt' support their 2013 cards (support ended in 2018) while Nvidia still releases new driver updates (to their 2012 6xx serie cards) to them in 2020. What is more Nvidia cards from 2012 support Vulkan 1.2. Also Nvidia tries hardest to make windows and linux features the same, to a point where Nvidia gave driver with freesync support (on linux) before AMD did. Also Nvidia does give you full day 1 driver support on linux. Also no one ever confirmed a case where Nvidia updated driver screwed performance for old cards.

You can complain about Nvidia stance vs opensource and how they aproach standards. But seriously their drivers are good, and were good for years and they give you official support for years.

[darkbasic]

You can complain about Nvidia stance vs opensource and how they aproach standards. But seriously their drivers are good, and were good for years and they give you official support for years.

So good that in 2020 you still can't use Wayland on Nvidia cards
The same applies to OpenCL 2.0, or at least that was the case few months ago.
Nvidia drivers are good until they don't like some standard and start forcing their proprietary shit down your throat: no thanks.

[piotrj3]

So good that in 2020 you still can't use Wayland on Nvidia cards
The same applies to OpenCL 2.0, or at least that was the case few months ago.
Nvidia drivers are good until they don't like some standard and start forcing their proprietary shit down your throat: no thanks.

You can use Nvidia with Wayland on Gnome and KDE. Nvidia even gave developer to make proper support in KDE for wayland. OpenCL2.0 is stupid to big point, searching for SVM revealed tons of stackoverflow threads where AMD has bugs with it, only proper support for it has Intel and just Intel (who lets be honest, have by far the best drivers out of all).

Point about standards and fact you don't have quite open source alternative is correct, but OpenCL2.0 is a mess and Wayland is supported for long time just via their EGLstreams.

[JMB9]

You can complain about Nvidia stance vs opensource and how they approach standards. But seriously their drivers are good, and were good for years and they give you official support for years.

Of cause there are Nvidia customers having no trouble under Linux. But the "worst company ever dealt with" saying was well earnt and is correct to this day - and there is no supported way (concerning Linux distributions) to use Nvidia reasonably - as Nouveau was actively fought instead of supported.
Nvidia has big pockets and their main business is graphics cards - but it does everything on their own to keep full control ... this is best for Windows ... but for Linux this is working against those who can help best.
And yes, I know of Nvidia problems which did not exist on Intel's iGPU (no dead due to `mitigations') or AMD's Navi systems. I don't say the quality of the proprietary Nvida driver is bad - but I say it would improve a lot when working together - and this shows - not only on latest kernels.

And yes - it is more than 15 years ago - but I had Nvidia HW and used it under Linux when suddenly support went in inactive mode ... really nice.
Don't think this will happen to GCN or RDNA in the next 10 years ... we will see ...
And think of the trouble till AMDGPU and RADV really worked ... and how long a real solution concerning Nouveau will need to be nearly feature compatible even if Nvidia really did their best to help and support it actively.

So really using Linux - at least semi-professional - means no Nvidia. That's it - and only Nvidia can change that - and I don't think that the community would not help if they are treated in a sane way.

[chrisq]

The gpu reset could have been useful feature if xorg and applications could actually survive it... Otherwise you still have to restart everything. And I don't see anyone exploring into that direction.

No, the main reason why this has been requested is for pci-passthrough in virtualization.

Many of their cards need to be reset after a virtual machine is shut down, or it is not usable again until you reboot the host.

[PackRat]

Used GCN 1.0 GPU for a while, no issues at all with AMDGPU, didn't see massive (or any noticable) improvements either tho., aside from vulkan. At the end, it did work well, reset wasn't needed since I do not remember last time driver/something actually crashed in order to require it.

I have had issues freezing with gnome and poor performance then I remembered that Ubuntu 20 does not default to wayland. No lock ups with wayland and performance is good.

[hgoel]

Should add that reset still doesn't work on RDNA either, nor does unbinding/rebinding. It's been an issue since launch, and the only fix so far is a patch from a third party that manages to reset the card more often, although still fails from time to time (thus requiring a full reboot, sometimes power cycling the card via suspend-to-ram works too). Between that and the lack of ROCm support one year in, the most that can be said about the RDNA support on Linux is that it's at least stable. It's otherwise rather disappointing for their flagship cards.