The Slides Announcing The New "AMDGPU" Kernel Driver

[dungeon]

This doesn't make any sense. If we didn't care about open source, we'd just have a single closed source driver and not support open source at all.

Having 2 drivers for similar tasks, also does not make any sense to me . radeon evolve greatly for most users and even for gaming, and now again will be preferably for running a plain DE or what, on today hardware even modesetting driver is fine for that.

[droste]

Everyone seems to keep asking the same question, but ignoring my response. Let's try this again: Having a shared components benefits both drivers since there will be more developers working on those components. We will now have a number of formerly closed source developers working on new open source components in additional to the open source developers. It doesn't matter what userspace graphics stack is running when you light up the displays or set up the power management hardware. Having more developers to help write and maintain and debug that code helps everyone.

I think everyone but dungeon got that it's a good thing

[dungeon]

I think everyone but dungeon got that it's a good thing

Nope i am mostly fine with that, especially this one:

It doesn't matter what userspace graphics stack is running when you light up the displays or set up the power management hardware.

But slightly corrected, so if does not matter why keeping it both? Drop non-pro, invest more in opensource one, plug in only firepro and everybody will be happy - including me

[oleid]

slightly corrected, so if does not matter why keeping it both? Drop non-pro, invest more in opensource one, plug in only firepro and everybody will be happy - including me

The stuff, for which it does not matter is shared. It *does*, however, matter for other stuff.

Still, I'm expecting the blob to become even less important in the next years...

[asdfblah]

I wonder... will AMDGPU use LLVM? If it does, hopefully AMD is working on it, because otherwise, it would take some time to improve it, at least judging by the kind of stuff seen with radeonsi. Having to wait a year to have good driver support is not something one would want or expect. Also, in the same topic, what about OpenCL support? Will there be more devs working in the open source implementation?

And, unrelated, what about current OpenCL support for Radeon?

But slightly corrected, so if does not matter why keeping it both? Drop non-pro, invest more in opensource one, plug in only firepro and everybody will be happy - including me

Isn't power management a *kernel* feature? If the kernel part of the driver is shared, then it wouldn't really matter, would it? Unless you are talking about a GUI tool to manage it, or about radeon (r600/radeonsi)...

[smitty3268]

I wonder... will AMDGPU use LLVM?

AMDGPU is only the kernel bits. LLVM isn't used by anyone inside the kernel, and never will be. The userspace driver is what uses LLVM - and there radeonsi will keep using it just as they already do.

[smitty3268]

But slightly corrected, so if does not matter why keeping it both? Drop non-pro, invest more in opensource one, plug in only firepro and everybody will be happy - including me

If you watched the presentation explaining all this, you'd have your answer already.

The non-pro version exists now because people today rely on the Catalyst driver for GL4, OpenCL2, etc. work that the open driver does not yet provide.

He pretty much flat out said they'd like to get rid of the remaining Catalyst blob on linux, it's just that Mesa isn't quite there yet and so they have to keep their current customers happy.

[pixo]

I am confused why is dungeon so against this move as the AMD is doing what he wish for, dropping closed source drivers for their cards.
The closed-source kernel and DDX drivers will not exist for the new cards in catalyst.
Catalyst will be reduced to 3D Graphics + Video Decode/Encode Library, same as Mesa (The Mesa 3D Graphics Library).

- There will be no closed-source drivers for AMD cards on linux for new cards.
- AMD will have to start supporting their cards before release, same as Intel.
- The drivers will have to work reliably if they dont want to loose workstation market.
- Drivers can be ported to other OSes , like BSD and Opensolaris, and to other ISAs, like ARM and MIPS, as it is all open-source.

I see this as a big +

[drSeehas]

...
- Drivers can be ported to other OSes , like BSD and Opensolaris, ...

Will AMD cooperate with the *BSDs and (Open-)Solaris, so we will have a choice (today only nVIDIA) there in the future?

[Luke_Wolf]

Will AMD cooperate with the *BSDs and (Open-)Solaris, so we will have a choice (today only nVIDIA) there in the future?

While it's possible I don't see them actively working with the *BSDs and Solaris, they might help maintain it if/when the respective communities have finished porting it, but I think you're just going to have to wait for the time being. That said the *BSDs are actively porting the modern graphics infrastructure now so hopefully it won't take them too long to get things going.

Then again with the increased manpower working on the kernel drivers AMD just might. Regardless within a few years (I'm not familiar enough with the efforts to make a real guess at the timeframe) AMD will be available as a proper choice.