The Slides Announcing The New "AMDGPU" Kernel Driver

[dungeon]

Yeah i am not amazed with quality of cpufreq too, specialy because default ondemand on distros ... but again that is not AMD only thing, many uses cpufreq driver. It is there to save some power basically, but also to produce problems on some setups too .

On my desktop low power Kabini i disabled that cpufreq, not needing it at all .

[higuita]

Thank you AMD!

i have to say THANK YOU AMD!!

I do really hope this will happen fast and even better, they apply to existent GPU/APU!!

if not, at least still support the "old" radeon development, don't forget about it, AMD!

This is how a HW company should support linux, i hope others learn from it.

As for feature request, don't forget overclocking/underclock support on open source. For low requirement games, one can underclock the GPU/APU to save power/keep cooler and low noise, and for heavy games, overclock it. This both to the desktop, laptop

[libv]

From the original proposal for an open source strategy...

... Comes this: "AMD has the option to replace this basic shader support with its own proprietary module to provide extra optimizations that may be required in certain enterprise level use cases. Hooks required by a such a proprietary module which provides shader optimization and arbitration could be added to the 3D driver. The basic 3D implementation would remain free software which would help to diffuse a lot of criticism from the community."

Written April/May 2007, as can be seen on the phoronix post with the full proposal. FYI, this proposal was written at a time when KMS was a header file thrown together by people who never had touched a display driver before.

[Asariati]

None of the slides list the business reasons behind the strategy. Besides business, what is the expected positive outcome for this new driver? Make some OSS fans happy???

[profoundWHALE]

None of the slides list the business reasons behind the strategy. Besides business, what is the expected positive outcome for this new driver? Make some OSS fans happy???

It opens them up to the Linux market. Right now, catalyst has incompatibility issues with versions of Linux and X.Org and Wayland and Mir. They're losing out in the Linux market more and more because NVidia drivers are so good, so people get NVidia when looking at a Linux machine (although they look at AMD and Intel for open source graphics). It also makes it super easy for end users to switch between Open Source and Closed Source.

[xeekei]

It opens them up to the Linux market. Right now, catalyst has incompatibility issues with versions of Linux and X.Org and Wayland and Mir. They're losing out in the Linux market more and more because NVidia drivers are so good, so people get NVidia when looking at a Linux machine (although they look at AMD and Intel for open source graphics). It also makes it super easy for end users to switch between Open Source and Closed Source.

Yes, with this, you could even switch drivers without rebooting.

[dungeon]

None of the slides list the business reasons behind the strategy. Besides business, what is the expected positive outcome for this new driver? Make some OSS fans happy???

Hmm i can't see anything for OSS fans to be happy about, that already does not exists Roughly speaking as primarly radeon driver user POV , amdgpu driver story looks like to me something like - unified driver infrastructure around blobs... so if i try to imagine that driver - there are nothing, but more blobs . I can only hope there be something more opensource in future, but that is about it.

But then again what can i say, "they open up what they can and not what they can't/wan't" roughly that is AMD strategy - i can only wish more, but i don't want to ask for more than that .

[xeekei]

Hmm i can't see anything for OSS fans to be happy about, that already does not exists Roughly speaking as primarly radeon driver user POV , amdgpu driver story looks like to me something like - unified driver infrastructure around blobs... so if i try to imagine that driver - there are nothing, but more blobs . I can only hope there be something more opensource in future, but that is about it.

But then again what can i say, "they open up what they can and not what they can't/wan't" roughly that is AMD strategy - i can only wish more, but i don't want to ask for more than that .

We all would want more open source. But this is a very reasonable compromise.

[johnc]

In today's world, if you want to stay in business, you better sell parts.
To do that properly, you _need_ to integrate well with Linux.
To do that properly, you Open Source your code as much as you can.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Linux FOSS market probably accounts for 0.000001% of GPU sales.

[bridgman]

Hmm i can't see anything for OSS fans to be happy about, that already does not exists Roughly speaking as primarly radeon driver user POV , amdgpu driver story looks like to me something like - unified driver infrastructure around blobs... so if i try to imagine that driver - there are nothing, but more blobs . I can only hope there be something more opensource in future, but that is about it.

But then again what can i say, "they open up what they can and not what they can't/wan't" roughly that is AMD strategy - i can only wish more, but i don't want to ask for more than that .

It means more people working on the open source code, at least on the parts used by both stacks.

Don't understand where you get "unified driver infrastructure around blobs" given that all of the common code is open source. Less blobs, not more.