AMD Ports Register Shadowing To The Mesa RADV Vulkan Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Ports Register Shadowing To The Mesa RADV Vulkan Driver

Most of the Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver development has been done by the likes of Valve, Google, and Red Hat engineers with it being an "unofficial" driver while AMD supports AMDVLK as their official open-source Vulkan driver as well as supporting their closed-source AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver too that shares common code with their Windows Vulkan driver. It was pleasant to see AMD this week though submitting new feature code to RADV...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RADV-Register-Shadowing

[MetalGearDaner]

Anybody knows why AMD has decided not to support RADV as their official open-source Vulkan driver and offer their own AMDVLK? What's the reason behind this? Wouldn't it make much more sense to focus efforts on one project instead of have literally THREE drivers for the same thing?

[shmerl]

Anybody knows why AMD has decided not to support RADV as their official open-source Vulkan driver and offer their own AMDVLK? What's the reason behind this? Wouldn't it make much more sense to focus efforts on one project instead of have literally THREE drivers for the same thing?

Supposedly to save the need on supporting separate driver code bases for Linux and Windows. But Intel is doing that fine, so that argument is pretty moot now that AMD is doing better financially than when they started working on the Vulkan driver.

[agd5f]

Wouldn't it make much more sense to focus efforts on one project instead of have literally THREE drivers for the same thing?

There are not 3 drivers. The open source AMDVLK and the closed source AMDVLK are the same driver, the latter just uses a different compiler which could not be open sourced which is being used by until we fully transition to LLVM, the rest of the code is the same. Also, the AMDVLK team is one team supporting multiple OSes. So it's not like there would suddenly be a bunch of people available to work on something else if we didn't support AMDVLK on Linux.

[jrch2k8]

I think is more to cover legally against lawsuits, since their announcement was an Opensource driver not support an Opensource Community Driver support hence they will continue to dump AMDVLK just to cover the basics

[user1]

There are not 3 drivers. The open source AMDVLK and the closed source AMDVLK are the same driver, the latter just uses a different compiler which could not be open sourced which is being used by until we fully transition to LLVM

Do you know if some other non Mesa AMD drivers have already switched to LLVM (like the new Windows GL driver)?

[agd5f]

Do you know if some other non Mesa AMD drivers have already switched to LLVM (like the new Windows GL driver)?

In addition to the open source AMDVLK, all of the compute drivers on Windows and Linux use LLVM (OpenCL, HIP, etc.).

[dlq84]

Thanks for the insight agd5f, I love how your profile still says "ATI Driver Developer".

[Michael]

Thanks for the insight agd5f, I love how your profile still says "ATI Driver Developer".

That's on me for never noticing / updating it in quite some time... Heh, should be fixed now.

[shmerl]

There are not 3 drivers. The open source AMDVLK and the closed source AMDVLK are the same driver, the latter just uses a different compiler which could not be open sourced which is being used by until we fully transition to LLVM, the rest of the code is the same. Also, the AMDVLK team is one team supporting multiple OSes. So it's not like there would suddenly be a bunch of people available to work on something else if we didn't support AMDVLK on Linux.

Yeah, it's more about AMD may be paying more people to basically work on radv, so essentially - may be another team. I hoped may be with things getting better for AMD that can happen since Intel manages to do it with anv which enabled initial radv development to begin with.