AMD Moves Forward With Unified Linux Driver Strategy, New Kernel Driver

[asdfblah]

Maintaining two different drivers for "old" hardware is a waste of resources, IMO. But OK, it is not my money
Thanks Radeon devs!

@CrystalGamma
Thanks for clearing things up for me. I'm a little worried about what will happen with the older devices - at this point I have a feeling I will never be able to crossfire my HD 5750s in linux. I can try doing it now in catalyst but there's no way to force-enable it anymore. I don't necessarily blame AMD for the way they decided to approach this - I feel more comfortable with them starting from scratch (though technically it isn't starting from scratch). Just a bit disappointing I might be left out of features I want/need. But, when the Windows drivers drop support for my GPUs, that's when I think I might need to do a full system upgrade.

agd5f has said this should be "relatively easy" IIRC... perhaps we should find someone to do it?

"There are no current plans to enable support for any ASICs which are already supported in Radeon."

So... Intel / Intel+nVidia for my new laptop and discrete nVidia for my desktop.

Got it, thanks AMD.

Do you really dislike the OSS driver? They are talking about support from Catalyst here...

So wait... this is a new open-source kernel driver, but AMD won't accept patches that enable older hardware?

Why?

It's the same open-source kernel driver, AFAIU. Again, they are talking about Catalyst.

Does this means that features like Crossfire support or Eyefinity could be open-sourced?

This is an interesting question. If they are using the same kernel driver, they should, at some point, add support for crossfire to it...

[My8th]

And that was the last we heard from Mr. Tibbs.

Not Mister Tibbs!

[xeekei]

This is exciting and has potential to make AMD the number one GPU vendor instead of NVidia for Linux gamers. Assuming the code quality improves.

[libv]

We survived radeonhd, didn't we?

You are welcome. Without RadeonHD, ATI would've buried any open source driver in the summer of 2007. It's only after the thing came out of the box that they changed tactics and teamed with redhat and "community members" behind RadeonHDs back.

[pandev92]

"There are no current plans to enable support for any ASICs which are already supported in Radeon."

So... Intel / Intel+nVidia for my new laptop and discrete nVidia for my desktop.

Got it, thanks AMD.

yes, my next card will be an nvidia , I'm so dissapointed, and with my apu a85600k I have good performance only in windows,.

[osmotr]

finally, I give up to selling my r9_290

[DrYak]

My opinion is that the kernel drivers won't lag much.

Currently, the opensource drivers only get done once the specs are officially made open to the opensource developers, around the time the hardware is released.

With this new model, driver development could start as soon as the internal discussion about the architecture of a new card start.
That means that initial support for some hardware could be enable well in advance before the actual hardware hits stores.

Look, at Intel, that's exactly what they are doing: the ground work to support some chips that will be released in 2015 is already underway now.

That would probably help having better support for newer hardware on time.

For professional customers (FireGL cards running on RedHat / Suse Enterprise / etc. or Debian Stable) - first the hardware tends to lag a bit (corresponding generation of hardware is only launched a bit after the gemer hardware) buying more time for the drivers to reach mainline for kernel versions in enterprise linux. Second: It should be possible for AMD to release DKMS - backports of the drivers to be recompiled on older kernels.


So, lots of the caveat reported by some may not even come.


Also this becomes rather interesting, at a time when Steamboxes are coming closer to reality, when AMD GPUs are also available on other competing consoles.

[liam]

yes, my next card will be an nvidia , I'm so dissapointed, and with my apu a85600k I have good performance only in windows,.

Sounds like windows is a great fit for you!

[MoonMoon]

Sounds like windows is a great fit for you!

So he should change to Windows because the AMD Linux driver for his hardware are shit and he points that out on a forum?

Your comment makes no sense in any way.

[droidhacker]

So wait... this is a new open-source kernel driver, but AMD won't accept patches that enable older hardware?

Why?

Well first off... I don't see this so much being a question of "their" unwillingness to accept patches to support older hardware, especially since they aren't the masters of the kernel. Realistically, its up to Linus, and, I think Dave Airlie?

Second... what they said, is that they (AMD) won't be dumping huge resources into a complete rewrite of support for hardware that is already supported, and this makes total sense -- first because it means that you can get the new driver ready for the new hardware SOONER, and second because you don't need to import all of the old dirt that comes along with all the old hardware.

Now there does happen to be an unpleasant side-effect of adding old hardware support to the new kernel driver through the "bypass AMD" approach... which is that all of the userspace drivers for the old hardware will have to be updated to match the new api (this one is a given, of course), AND that the crapalyzt blobs will NOT be updated to work with the old hardware using the new api.


My hope in this new driver, is that it lets users pick and choose the catalyst "features" that they want to make use of, leaving the open source components in place to support everything else.