AMD Releases New "AMDGPU" Linux Kernel Driver & Mesa Support

[xeekei]

Just a reminder that most of the things you associate with "progress" (GL levels, gaming performance etc..) are in the radeonsi (pipe) and radeon (winsys) userspace drivers, which are the same whether you are using radeon or amdgpu kernel drivers.

But wasn't the new Catalyst (the one using AMDGPU) supposed to adopt GLAMOR for 2D? My biggest gripes with Catalyst right now is the 2D performance.

[smitty3268]

as far as I understood, you would be able to swap between mesa and catalyst on demand if it's just a userspace driver
or is that incorrect?
because that would be interesting(and extremely useful) if so.

Not yet, because the userspace portions of the drivers will conflict with each other.

NVidia had a proposal out for a new OpenGL ABI on linux, that would solve the problem. I'm guessing that's getting folded into the Vulkan drivers since they are supposed to come with a single common loader that handles multiple drivers for you.

[smitty3268]

But wasn't the new Catalyst (the one using AMDGPU) supposed to adopt GLAMOR for 2D? My biggest gripes with Catalyst right now is the 2D performance.

Bridgman wasn't talking about Catalyst at all, he was only comparing the 2 OSS driver stacks.

But yes, when Catalyst is updated it will start using Glamor (supposedly - it's still pretty far out at this point).

[xeekei]

Bridgman wasn't talking about Catalyst at all, he was only comparing the 2 OSS driver stacks.

But yes, when Catalyst is updated it will start using Glamor (supposedly - it's still pretty far out at this point).

I love that. Hopefully Freesync and Vulkan will come soon too. It depends on how their next card line up really looks, but there are many reasons to go AMD for me now.

[kenjitamura]

Linux kernel forbids to have two drivers for the same hardware. That's why Michael wrote this in the aritcle:

I don't think AMD has ever mentioned the possibility of AMDGPU being used for cards older than Tonga. On the Radeon side they might be able to hack something together but on the Catalyst side AMD would need to explicitly include codes for older GPU's wouldn't they? If so, we may never see the Catalyst blob being used for older AMD GPU's with this new kernel driver and thus no hot-swapping abilities.

[blacknova]

Kind of disappointing that ealier GCN cards are not supported, but hey may be Tahiti support can be ported to amdgpu to provided unified driver, instead of supporting multiple drivers.

[agd5f]

Kind of disappointing that ealier GCN cards are not supported, but hey may be Tahiti support can be ported to amdgpu to provided unified driver, instead of supporting multiple drivers.

They are still supported with radeon and they use the same mesa driver (radeonsi).

[przemoli]

Can anyone comment on Godavari support in that driver?

[extraymond]

Can anyone comment on Godavari support in that driver?

That's a really interesting question, as far as I know godavari is just kaveri refreshed, like richland to trinity.
So it might not get newer generation architecture. So no I guess.

[dungeon]

@agd5f

drm missing include amdgpu_drm.h file... actually just does not get installed here, should be included in Makefile.am i guess .