AMD's Open-Source Radeon Linux Driver: 2014 Was Incredible

[asdfblah]

No. Current generation cards can do anything that is currently required from a video card. The only reason to deprecate them is to force people to upgrade. AMD has been playing this game for very long, even nvidia started to copycat it. If AMD came out and said fglrx will be deprecated, but amdgpu will support all non-legacy cards instead, I'd be happy. However, not even the current latest GPU will be supported. How is this fair?

What the hell are you talking about? AFAIU, radeon (r300, r600 and radeonsi) will keep being supported, amdgpu is a new driver for the newer cards that will also be open source and be supported. What's wrong with that? Do you not understand what it means to be open source, mainlined and maintained by AMD itself? It means that they are FORCED to keep supporting these drivers over time, otherwise the drivers are completely dropped from mesa/kernel.

EDIT: Without full scale launch day support the OSS drivers can't replace catalyst. I don't think catalyst is going anywhere anytime soon. Linux itself would have to be significantly changed.

This. The only bad part of this is that we are still lacking a lot of features... AMD should hire more mesa/kernel devs IMO. But of course there are and there will be options for people to have out-of-the-box support, like https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack for LTS releases of ubuntu.

[Michael]

AFAIK you got R7 260X also Wikipedia says HD7850 and R7 270 are almost identical Pitcairn variants.

Meant the R7 260X as what's stuck in the LinuxBenchmarking.com system.

[smitty3268]

EDIT: Without full scale launch day support the OSS drivers can't replace catalyst. I don't think catalyst is going anywhere anytime soon. Linux itself would have to be significantly changed.

I don't think that's the plan.

As long as amdgpu is built as a kernel module, there's no reason the fglrx install on an older kernel couldn't replace it. Right?

So, they'd keep the "current" amdgpu code all upstream, but each Catalyst release would contain a copy of it, modified to compile against older kernels.

Then when you run the OSS drivers, you get whatever is built into the kernel, and if you install Catalyst, you get whatever is most recent installed over the top of your kernel.

That's already basically what's happening now, if you install a new version of Catalyst over an old one, it's just that the kernel module is proprietary AMD code rather than OSS AMD code.

They could release the OSS code on launch day, at the same time they release the fglrx drivers, for major new hardware launches.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

The only reason to deprecate them is to force people to upgrade.

The dynamics have changed. The OSS radeon stack is quite good and complete; is only missing a handful of things.

The reason AMD would deprecate some cards from FGLRX is not because of forcing upgrades, it would be because AMD as a company does not want to support them anymore, but since the OSS stack has matured quite well who needs AMD anymore? We don't. We can now keep our cards for as long as we want. We have the docs, and we have our own devs. Forced upgrade need not apply.

The point I am making to you is that the OSS stack stands (largely)independent of AMD wheras FGLRX is completely in AMD's clutches. Once code goes into the OSS stack, its ours. Not AMD's. They can't take it away.

No. Current generation cards can do anything that is currently required from a video card.

Your card will not break the day FGLRX loses support for certain cards. FGLRX has gone through several rounds of deprecations already for older generations already, those cards are currently still in use.

AMD has been playing this game for very long, even nvidia started to copycat it. If AMD came out and said fglrx will be deprecated, but amdgpu will support all non-legacy cards instead, I'd be happy. However, not even the current latest GPU will be supported. How is this fair?

Perhaps you are new to Phoronix. AMD's support of OSS may be wanting in some ways, but they are light years ahead of nvidia.

Linus Torvalds gave the finger to nvidia, not AMD. If nvidia were to follow AMD's lead some day, there would be a whole lot of happy Linux users on that day.

If AMD came out and said fglrx will be deprecated, but amdgpu will support all non-legacy cards instead, I'd be happy. However, not even the current latest GPU will be supported. How is this fair?

We are a long way away from any of this actually happening. Just so that is once again stated, perhaps more clearly this time. All of AMD's development should go into the OSS stack. FGLRX is simply siphoning off resources.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

EDIT: Without full scale launch day support the OSS drivers can't replace catalyst. I don't think catalyst is going anywhere anytime soon. Linux itself would have to be significantly changed.

Unfortunately, I agree. FGLRX is with us, for now, as far as the eye can see.

[mmstick]

Actually, because of the AMDGPU kernel driver, that would imply that they would need FOSS support on day one as Catalyst now depends upon that support.

[Adarion]

Things like HW accelerated video STILL need some attention.

Yes. Either I am doing something wrong or it still does have problems.
UVD is activated (so I seem to have put the right firmware on the list) and I compiled everything to use VDPAU (Gentoo, all machines) but especially VLC seems to have problems (but then I do not fully trust VLC anymore). It is spamming the console with error messages. Also flash (...I know, flash is ugly) videos seem jerky, stuttering, tearing and so on. For me this happens from HD5670 to SeaIslands (Kabini). The HW itself is definitely okay since the same stuff works on Windows NT 5.1. Meoowww! But little cute Tux also wants nice video!

In other news the framerate of Shadowrun Returns Dragonfall (director's cut) is unbearable on an Athlon 5350 and mediocre on my HD5670. (Shadowrun worked on the 5670 in Windows quite nice) And SeaIslands still has rendering bugs in KDE (esp. with transparency). And in any case I am well above minimum requirements.

But then the driver has come a long way. A lot of other indie games run nice on my HD5670, I had blender on an E-350 (also 5xxx series based) and generally a lot of things that were doing better and better with each kernel/mesa/... release. Some day, I think it was S.P.A.Z., the game went from command stream errors / black screen to fully playable with a kernel upgrade. That was a really lifting moment. I am looking forward to 2015 for great driver things to come.

[Nille_kungen]

The dynamics have changed. The OSS radeon stack is quite good and complete; is only missing a handful of things.

The reason AMD would deprecate some cards from FGLRX is not because of forcing upgrades, it would be because AMD as a company does not want to support them anymore, but since the OSS stack has matured quite well who needs AMD anymore? We don't. We can now keep our cards for as long as we want. We have the docs, and we have our own devs. Forced upgrade need not apply.

The point I am making to you is that the OSS stack stands (largely)independent of AMD wheras FGLRX is completely in AMD's clutches. Once code goes into the OSS stack, its ours. Not AMD's. They can't take it away.

AMD seriously supports the open source development and there legacy support is the open source driver.
Even if they drop fgrlx support for some cards they still gives us a good alternative.
The radeon driver wouldn't be anywhere as good as it is now if it wasn't for AMD open source developers, let's not deny them their well deserved credit for all the work they done.
My point is that we do need AMD open source team or the driver wouldn't be anywhere as good as it is.

[geearf]

The radeon driver wouldn't be anywhere as good as it is now if it wasn't for AMD open source developers, let's not deny them their well deserved credit for all the work they done.

I don't know if that's fully true.
Many of the radeon devs were working on it before being hired by AMD.
Maybe they would have got hired by RedHat or Suse or another company to work on them.
I definitely appreciate AMD's hiring them here, but I don't know if it was so much of a do or die.
Maybe it is easier for them to get access to documents as opposed to the radeonhd guys since they are inside?

[pingufunkybeat]

I set up an HTPC the other week, based on an A4 APU, running OpenELEC which is an embedded linux distro based on XBMC/KODI.

Works out of the box, with power saving, GL effects, and silky-smooth VDPAU playback.

I remember when the r600c driver rendered its first triangle. Many thanks to the devs, and let's hope that 2015 is the year that brings full OpenCL compliance and OpenGL4.2!