The Slides Announcing The New "AMDGPU" Kernel Driver

[entropy]

If the new driver was prototyped using Sea Island hardware,
why don't they enable (opt-in) support for these in the long run?
I could imagine this would make a lot of AMD supporters happy.

Wouldn't it also mean AMD has to maintain the current FGLRX for quite some time?
After all, the 9xx line won't be that old and if it's not supported by the new driver model,
telling the customers to use radeon is not an option I guess (definitely not for their FIREGL customers).

[entropy]

Wouldn't it also mean AMD has to maintain the current FGLRX for quite some time?
After all, the 9xx line won't be that old and if it's not supported by the new driver model,
telling the customers to use radeon is not an option I guess (definitely not for their FIREGL customers).

I meant the Radeon 2xx line, of course...

[droidhacker]

What... PRECISELY... does "Workstation features" mean?

[pandev92]

Mesa running on top of amdgpu instead of radeonsi (or even r600 ?): could be doable, depends on how much resources are available (mostly developers in the opensource community).
Might be useful to reduce the amount of code that needs to be shared and maintained between backends. (Depending on how much the future R300 GPUs supported by amdgpu share with the GPUs supported by radeonsi).

Catalyst for older cards running on top of amdgpu instead of fglrx ? not a chance.
- Very likely AMD doesn't have enough developers on their payroll available to port the older catalysts to the new kernel driver.
- Very likely the AMD stance will be use amdgpu/catalyst_new for recent cards...
- ...fglrx/catalyst_old for older cards
- and switch to opensource as the official supported version, once support is dropped out of catalyst (as done currently with the older non-unified shader r300 series, or for the few more recent (like HD 2x00/3x00/4x00) which are supported by r600 but aren't supported by catalyst anymore.

And again, the best part of this is:
- amdgpu will get developed at time corresponding cards will get designed (amdgpu support for R300 is going to happen over the next months, not later in 2015, long after the cards are in shops)
- amd might throw a bit resources for some features that might be useful for their drivers, but which haven't been supported in opensource drivers yet (lay more ground work for cross-fire in a future version of AMDGPU ?)

No more amd since they do a good catalyst driver for my apu.

[dungeon]

What... PRECISELY... does "Workstation features" mean?

Support is aimed for workstation users with FirePro graphic chips only. Those users will not be happy even if Mesa right now has OpenGL 5.0 support

[Awesomeness]

In all of those markets the customer desire for a FOSS GPU driver is practically nil.

But it's a legal requirement to have a GPL-compatible kernel module.

[agd5f]

From an open source perspective, nothing really changes. There's just a different kernel driver loaded. The existing open source usermode drivers (3D, compute, video) will be updated to work with the new kernel module. Catalyst will effectively be just a drop in usermode driver replacement for users that need features that are not supported by the open source drivers.

[Nille_kungen]

From an open source perspective, nothing really changes. There's just a different kernel driver loaded. The existing open source usermode drivers (3D, compute, video) will be updated to work with the new kernel module. Catalyst will effectively be just a drop in usermode driver replacement for users that need features that are not supported by the open source drivers.

Will i be able to use the Radeon driver for my everyday work and catalyst userspace only for one game in the same x session?

[Nille_kungen]

Will i be able to use the Radeon driver for my everyday work and catalyst userspace only for one game in the same x session?

I mean the new open source driver not the old Radeon.

[blackiwid]

From an open source perspective, nothing really changes. There's just a different kernel driver loaded. The existing open source usermode drivers (3D, compute, video) will be updated to work with the new kernel module. Catalyst will effectively be just a drop in usermode driver replacement for users that need features that are not supported by the open source drivers.

thats kind of the problem, they get what they want, because they cant fix the extremly buggy unusable proprietary blob without kernel integration (they had enough time for it and failed hard), but for closing all eyes on that move, we get nothing.

I am at least not shure anymore if its good to allow that. Even the marketing, they start from left to right, the shitiest version left is the open one, then the standard one, and then the firepro.

The problem is even if other evil stuff would not matter just for selling the same card as firepro version thhey need a proprietary driver to slow down the non-firepro variant.

On the other site if the people that could stop that, not integrate it into the kernel and some who could maybe sue them when they are allowed by linus, would it maybe help the free driver more? And to say in the past they proofed that they payed some developers or something like that means we should trust them and this (in future we will do more for opensource stuff) is naiv, they just changed their manager the second time, we do not know what happens, they will most likely not kill the free drivers or stopp support completly, but slow it down.

They need to have at least a long term plan to kill the blob, if their primary driver will be forever the blob, why would we allow them stuff we did allow other companies not, so its completly painless to use this proprietary driver? It needs pain, else we are not 1% better than bsd.

And even if it would be ok for amd, because they are the good ones maybe, what message do we tell evil arm companies or nvidia, next thing we will see nvidia has vesa + nvidia kernel modul that also supports the current vesa driver so its ok to include it even everybody only uses it for the blob?