Is it possible to have AMDVLK and Mesa on same machine?

[dimko]

Hello.
Can two drives, if not run in parallel, but co-exist in same OS?
I am on gentoo. I would love to see HDR working on my machine.
I am using Mesa, but Mesa does not allow for HDR.
AMDVLK on the other hand - does, or so I heard(in some media players).

Bonus questions:
Which media players.
Has anyone done it in Gentoo? How hard is it?
Also, why AMDVLK? GPU driver is in kernel + Mesa is there for openGL + Vulkan. Why did AMD create a new wheel?

[bridgman]

Hello.
Can two drives, if not run in parallel, but co-exist in same OS?
I am on gentoo. I would love to see HDR working on my machine.
I am using Mesa, but Mesa does not allow for HDR.
AMDVLK on the other hand - does, or so I heard(in some media players).

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...ier-RADV-Usage

Bonus questions:
...
Also, why AMDVLK? GPU driver is in kernel + Mesa is there for openGL + Vulkan. Why did AMD create a new wheel?

We didn't. AMD developed and released the Linux Vulkan driver in binary form before RADV existed, and well before it became mainstream. IIRC we said that we would work on open sourcing it around the time we released the binary version, but I don't remember the exact timeline.

Between releasing the binary Vulkan driver and completing the open sourcing effort RADV became popular, so we had to choose between basically saying "well you wrote your own driver so we're not going to finish open sourcing ours" or to go ahead and finish the work to release an open source version and update it periodically for new hardware.

We had already completed most of the open sourcing work by the time RADV became a thing and there was no way to get that time back, so releasing it and periodically updating it from the closed source tree seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

[dimko]

Thank you bridgman, interesting and informative, as usual!