RadeonSI Gallium3D Gets New State Handling

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonSI Gallium3D Gets New State Handling

AMD pushed a load of commits this morning into the mainline Mesa Git repository that provide a new state handling implementation for the Radeon HD 7000 series "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE0NTU

[allquixotic]

And to think, I was overjoyed when they pushed the initial G3D code several months ago. What I didn't realize at the time is that the "initial" code was only about 10% of the work towards making a stable/usable driver.

Ever since I realized just how long this is actually going to take, I've steered away nine different people from buying Radeons when considering a hardware upgrade. Seven of them have been using Radeons for many generations and were thinking of doing it again. All nine are Linux users, though four of them don't run exclusively Linux (they dual boot, like me).

As an alternative I steer them to Ivy Bridge/HD4000 graphics for most needs. For the guys who insist on high end gaming I steer them to a discrete Nvidia card and reassure them that the Nvidia binary drivers at least work on the latest kernel/Xorg, and you have a decent chance of nouveau working well enough for desktop usage.

To me, the problem isn't just this one cycle.. the problem is endemic. AMD keeps putting out new architectures every 2 years or so, and each time they do, the open drivers lag behind by more than a year. For people who upgrade frequently, that's 50% of the graphics card's lifespan. And you spend the latter 50% of it filing bugs and waiting for the finishing touches to be implemented, things like actually usable performance, and bugfixes to all the kernel panics, userspace crashes, etc. that crop up randomly while running real world apps.

The only way out that I can see for AMD would be for them to hire on a temporary 6 month team of like 80 people, divide up the work on the drivers and just grunt out a production-quality driver for all the current ASICs plus the generation that's currently in development. Get the team all "caught up" and then leave to go work on other projects or get RIFed. This would free up the permanent open source team to stop playing catch-up: they would be able to dedicate 100% of their attention to the card coming down the development pipeline before it goes into production, and on release day of the card, distros would already be shipping a production-quality driver (well, at least as good as r600g is today for Evergreen).

It's just unacceptable that every other series of AMD card involves a year or more of waiting.

HD5000 = ridiculous waiting
HD6000 = not much waiting because arch didn't change much
HD7000 = ridiculous waiting
HD8000 = probably not going to be much waiting because arch didn't change much
HD9000 = ridiculous waiting, unless something changes in the development process and they catch up.

[Shnatsel]

The only way out that I can see for AMD would be for them to hire on a temporary 6 month team of like 80 people, divide up the work on the drivers and just grunt out a production-quality driver for all the current ASICs plus the generation that's currently in development. Get the team all "caught up" and then leave to go work on other projects or get RIFed.

The problem about this, as Michael pointed out multiple times, is these 80 people simply do not exist.

The open source driver stack has picked up support for 9 years of hardware introductions in less than 5 years, with the 10th (SI) pretty close. New hardware already has launch time support when the GPU architecture doesn't change drastically (Ontario, Llano and Trinity for example) and by next year should have launch time support even on new GPU cores.

Quoted from http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTEwNjI

There was hope that open-source team will start working on hardware enablement as soon as proprietary driver team did for CGN, but evidently this is not the case. The article also mentions the goal of gaining access to hardware emulators, etc. Even without the magical 80 people, there's still hope.

[artivision]

[QUOTE=HD5000 = ridiculous waiting
HD6000 = not much waiting because arch didn't change much
HD7000 = ridiculous waiting
HD8000 = probably not going to be much waiting because arch didn't change much
HD9000 = ridiculous waiting, unless something changes in the development process and they catch up.[/QUOTE]

Some one more informed than me, told me that Radeon8000 will be totaly different than 7000. The difference will be smaller circuit per operation. probably 2-4 times smaller per Flop.

[maldorordiscord]

The problem is bigger and deeper than the most people can Imagine.
The problem is the Corporatism system : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
Now most people will ask what the hell do have (EVIL)corporatism to do with hardware and drivers? let me explain:

We do have 4 examples : (1) Loongson (2) Intel (3) AMD (4) Nvidia

1. example is not a example of Corporatism because its the only sample of not beeing corrupted in the capitalism system by a Corporatism Fascism.
Loongson only support open-source/Free-software Linux-drivers if you buy the product you get 100% of your money back in "Support" in a way open-source/free-software benefit from it.

2. Intel is a part of the Corporatism(Fascism)-capitalism system if you buy a Intel system 1,5-6% of your money will go into Open-source/free-software support and the other 94% will go to the "MASTER" with the name "Microsoft" because the hardware costs are a buffet this means the price is the same for windows users and Linux users but the windows users get a cross-platform-subsidization from the Linux users from 94% of there "support" money.

3. AMD is a little bit more complex but there are also a part of the Corporatism(Fascism)-capitalism system because there are also drain a cross-platform-subsidization of 94% of the linux users and then they also cut the linux-catalyst-closed-source costs out of the 6% this result end in only 2% support for the opensource-radeon driver.

4. Nvidia is the worst of all cases no support go into opensource and free software and the biggest part 94% is a cross-platform-subsidization for Windows.

Corporatism works always in the same way the little people "workers" get a little piece of the cake intel: 6% AMD:2% nvidia:0% but only if they pay the cross-platform-subsidization-Windows-TAX of 94% of the support costs.

In fact Open-Source/Free-Software only win with your consuming of products if you buy "Loongson-like" products and Open-Source/Free-Software lose if you buy products from Corporatism(Fascism)-capitalism system Microsoft partners.
This is a sad fact Intel+AMD+NVIDIA will only send your "support" money to Microsoft only because of there bigger market-share.
This is how our Corporatism(Fascism)-capitalism system works!

This is how the Nazis driver there hole economy back in 1933 the people get a little cake and the company get the big profit.

[artivision]

Something goes wrong "totally" with 1-L? I didn't do it.

[maldorordiscord]

Something goes wrong "totally" with 1-L? I didn't do it.

what do you mean ?

[artivision]

The problem is bigger and deeper than the most people can Imagine.
The problem is the Corporatism system : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
Now most people will ask what the hell do have (EVIL)corporatism to do with hardware and drivers? let me explain:

We do have 4 examples : (1) Loongson (2) Intel (3) AMD (4) Nvidia

1. example is not a example of Corporatism because its the only sample of not beeing corrupted in the capitalism system by a Corporatism Fascism.
Loongson only support open-source/Free-software Linux-drivers if you buy the product you get 100% if your money back in "Support" in a way open-source/free-software benefit from it.

2. Intel is a part of the Corporatism(Fascism)-capitalism system if you buy a Intel system 1,5-6% of your money will go into Open-source/free-software support and the other 94% will go to the "MASTER" with the name "Microsoft" because the hardware costs are a buffet this means the price is the same for windows users and Linux users but the windows users get a cross-platform-subsidization from the Linux users from 94% of there "support" money.

3. AMD is a little bit more complex but there are also a part of the Corporatism(Fascism)-capitalism system because there are also drain a cross-platform-subsidization of 94% of the linux users and then they also cut the linux-catalyst-closed-source costs out of the 6% this result end in only 2% support for the opensource-radeon driver.

4. Nvidia is the worst of all cases no support go into opensource and free software and the biggest part 94% is a cross-platform-subsidization for Windows.

Corporatism works always in the same way the little people "workers" get a little piece of the cake intel: 6% AMD:2% nvidia:0% but only if they pay the cross-platform-subsidization-Windows-TAX of 94% of the support costs.

In fact Open-Source/Free-Software only win with your consuming of products if you buy "Loongson-like" products and Open-Source/Free-Software lose if you buy products from Corporatism(Fascism)-capitalism system Microsoft partners.
This is a sad fact Intel+AMD+NVIDIA will only send your "support" money to Microsoft only because of there bigger market-share.
This is how our Corporatism(Fascism)-capitalism system works!

This is how the Nazis driver there hole economy back in 1933 the people get a little cake and the company get the big profit.

Companies like Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, are close not because of bigger market share but because they have create a monopoly. With D3D they closed gaming inside Windows and with the Static-Compiling all programs are only for x86 and with all this smaller gaming companies for example they don't have a change against bigger ones. When we people choose to make Wine, or choose Linux or even Android the monopoly brakes. Then Nvidia has to abandon Microsoft and their next Voxel-Raytracing engine (see ID-tech-6) will be OpenGL. Thats it OGL is Open any one can develop for it, for how long Nvidia will give their technology to Microsoft for just monopoly.

[maldorordiscord]

Companies like Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, are close not because of bigger market share but because they have create a monopoly. With D3D they closed gaming inside Windows and with the Static-Compiling all programs are only for x86 and with all this smaller gaming companies for example they don't have a change against bigger ones. When we people choose to make Wine, or choose Linux or even Android the monopoly brakes. Then Nvidia has to abandon Microsoft and their next Voxel-Raytracing engine (see ID-tech-6) will be OpenGL. Thats it OGL is Open any one can develop for it, for how long Nvidia will give their technology to Microsoft for just monopoly.

Sure this only works because of "monopole-like" structures.
But the tropic is the open-source driver ans open-source customers lose because of there Small market share because they pay the cross-platform-microsoft-support-tax.

Maybe this will change in the future but right now this is a FACT.

[Veerappan]

As was mentioned before. The Radeon drivers have added support for 9 years of hardware in the last 5 years. In the case of my radeon 4850, which I bought in Fall of 2008, it was 8+ months before a classic Mesa driver got usable 3D support (2D worked ok, but I ran Catalyst at the time). In the meantime, we've gotten a rock solid r300g driver, good quality r600g which needs performance optimization and some new OpenGL features, and now we're getting VDPAU/OpenCL/GLES and other features as well.

The Radeon 7000 (SI) chips already have KMS, they have the xorg-modesetting driver for X. They will get GLAMOR for 2D acceleration at the same time as they get 3D. And hopefully the performance optimizations for SI won't be as hard as the older VLIW architectures, which means that the SI chips might hit more of their performance potential with less work. Yes, it's going to take a little longer for that support to materialize. But I have a feeling that the rate of improvement will be quite good once we get to the point that the basic 3D driver works.

And that is when I will decide if I want to upgrade my 6850 to something newer.