AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series Firmware Upstreamed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series Firmware Upstreamed

The last piece of the open-source driver equation for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 "RDNA3" series support on Linux is now properly upstream...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RDNA3-AMDGPU-Firmware-Added

[Espionage724]

Why can't the firmware be on the GPU from the factory?

[qarium]

Why can't the firmware be on the GPU from the factory?

we said this to bridgman and other AMD employees like 1000 times. all the law problems with opensource dristros come from this.
Richard Stallmann said something like if you can not upate it then it is hardware if you can update it then it is software and you should demant it opensource
but all the intel systems with closed source microcode stored in BIOS/UEFI work perfectly with all the opensource focused distros ...
it is really strange that we can not have this for GPUs to.

it all comes down to the fact that the board partners don't solder a flash chip for that purpose because "'windows" don't need it. and the benefit for all the windows customers would be minimal. for windows they calculate like this the driver DVD in the box costs something like 50 cent and the chip on the board costs more.

so it all comes down to linux does not have a relevant marketshare to make this a priority ... and to buy gpu cards from these board partners and use it with linux does not help because the board partners think they sell it all to windows people.

i tell you now what is the only thing what really helps with that: Buy the Valve Steam Deck... thats the only chips they calculate and count as "Linux" sales.

it is really stupid like that... they only count steam deck as linux sales... and the Tesla Motors chips in cars to they count them as linux sales to.

all the PCIe GPU cards are not counted as linux sales...

we talked about this with bridgman and other AMD employees multible times no one cares. buy steam deck or a tesla car or else you do not support linux.

[catpig]

What I wanna know is why AMD delays this firmware blob posting to the point that it is guaranteed not to work out of the box at or near launch... sure, for me this is not a problem, but I run Gentoo so I probably qualify as a masochist. For the much-famed Average User (tm), even if we restrict that label to Linux users who use this category of card... that's a different story.

[qarium]

What I wanna know is why AMD delays this firmware blob posting to the point that it is guaranteed not to work out of the box at or near launch... sure, for me this is not a problem, but I run Gentoo so I probably qualify as a masochist. For the much-famed Average User (tm), even if we restrict that label to Linux users who use this category of card... that's a different story.

i think if you upload the firmware before that critical date you can use the source code combined with the firmware to get informations they do not want to publish before the launch.