AMD RadeonSI Driver Officially Gets Compute Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD RadeonSI Driver Officially Gets Compute Support

AMD's open-source "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards and newer now has early compute/GPGPU support...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM0NDQ

[jrch2k8]

nice i just got my MSI 7770 all nighter compiling

[Ibidem]

nice i just got my MSI 7770 all nighter compiling

Shouldn't take that long, unless you have to build LLVM as well.
(make -j1 for mesa 8 /radeon gallium3d was ~1hr on a 1.6 GHz Neo, IIRC)

[chithanh]

Shouldn't take that long, unless you have to build LLVM as well.

In order to get radeonsi compute support, you need to build LLVM from svn with R600 target. Along with some other things like libclc.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

In order to get radeonsi compute support, you need to build LLVM from svn with R600 target. Along with some other things like libclc.

Last I checked, libclc is being dropped for direct NVPTX proper seeing as the present lbclc target with the native OpenCL in Clang is for the Nvidia PTX Target, hence the NVPTX target that is on by default.

At any rate, with an AMD 8350 and 32GB of RAM LLVM/Clang/libc++/compiler-rt/lldb/clang-extra/test-suite/ and enabling the LLVM and Clang Examples builds in around 10 minutes via make -j9, and that includes inserting the R600 under the Experimental Target CMAKE flag.

Get that built and I you'll probably be spending the bulk of your time fiddling with Mesa config issues.

[przemoli]

"The open-source Radeon Gallium3D compute support isn't too good yet, namely implemented through OpenCL"

Anyone can rephrase it so that I can understand it?

[ChrisXY]

Last I checked, libclc is being dropped for direct NVPTX proper seeing as the present lbclc target with the native OpenCL in Clang is for the Nvidia PTX Target, hence the NVPTX target that is on by default.

Last time I checked mesa's configure said that libclc was required.

It has a target named "r600--" I think this is needed.
I tried that one http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/libclc/trunk (as opposed to git://people.freedesktop.org/~tstellar/libclc, not sure if it is up to date) (you can look at this patch for configure.py that adds a bit of standard functionality for configure/make but it's badly formatted: http://marc.info/?l=mesa3d-dev&m=135423641422147)

Mesa at least compiles with --enable-opencl and for some reason is 166 Megabyte smaller than 1 or 2 days ago without --enable-opencl. Let's see if it works.

Edit: Well, X doesn't start when I have radeon enabled (I have a hybrid one with intel):

X: Threading.cpp:28: bool llvm::llvm_start_multithreaded(): Assertion `!multithreaded_mode && "Already multithreaded!"' failed.

[brent]

How usable is the OpenCL implementation (in terms of API/specification completeness) and performance anyway?

[chithanh]

How usable is the OpenCL implementation (in terms of API/specification completeness) and performance anyway?

The current state of things is summarized here: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/GalliumCompute
To my knowledge and according to the article, only a few demos work right now. (No, you can't have bitcoin. Not yours.) That also means that nobody is asking for performance right now.

[brent]

Damn. Even many basic features are missing. That doesn't look very promising.