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

[peppercats]

So AMDGPU is only for newer cards? was looking forward to being able to hotswap between mesa and catalyst.

[xeekei]

This is exciting. Can't wait for the R9 285 tests.

[johnc]

Hmm.... makes me wonder if this means the R9 300 series will be released soon...

Julyish or maybe after based on the Q1 analyst call.

[peppercats]

Most of our focus has been on Carrizo support, so there are some gaps
in the dGPU support for Tonga and Iceland, notably power management.
Those gaps will be filled in eventually.

Anyone know what Iceland is?

[Veerappan]

W00! Congrats to the AMD team for getting this out the door.

Should make the next upgrade a pretty easy decision, and it'll make my next laptop purchase much more likely to be an AMD APU-based machine (which it was probably going to be anyway).

Hopefully this will make it brain-dead simple to switch between catalyst/mesa for OpenCL runtimes as well... I.e. Run Mesa for all of my day to day stuff, and then do an LD_PRELOAD/LD_LIBRARY_PATH override any time that I want to run an OpenCL workload test against catalyst.

Hopefully this mixing of drivers will be possible if they're both running on the same shared kernel driver/libdrm.

[Creak]

So AMDGPU is only for newer cards? was looking forward to being able to hotswap between mesa and catalyst.

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

Hidden behind a kernel option is basic support for AMD Sea Islands GPUs within the AMDGPU driver stack, but that's just in there for AMD's initial testing purposes.

Maybe later they will disable radeonsi and activate amdgpu for the GPUs managed by radeonsi. But that's a big maybe and a big later, because until amdgpu driver is over, we might not really need a top notch driver for radeonsi GPUs.

[bridgman]

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.

[dungeon]

Congrats AMD

Didn't expect GCN 1.1 will be also supported, just assumed 1.1 might be better starting point because of Carrizo-L and Godavari .

[smitty3268]

Michael,

Next up for AMD Linux we'll hopefully see the new Catalyst driver published that leverages the AMDGPU kernel driver, but that probably won't come until the new hardware launches are within sight.

Again, Michael, AMD has been clear that Catalyst support for the ADMGPU kernel won't go public until the r9 4xx generation, a.k.a. quite a while. They'll only use it for internal testing on the upcoming r9 3xx generation.

I get the feeling you are setting yourself up for some big anti-AMD rant for not doing this right away, and constant streams of articles about how it's still not been done. I really hope that's not where this is going.

[peppercats]

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.

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.