catalyst vs open source

[ossuser]

Thanks for the links bridgman, I'll start digging.

[ossuser]

After digging around in OpenGL, shaders and OpenCL, one question comes to mind:

What's the AMD roadmap for Vulkan ?

[SXX⁣]

What's the AMD roadmap for Vulkan ?

Doubt you'll hear anything from any GPU vendor until specification released.

[ossuser]

Doubt you'll hear anything from any GPU vendor until specification released.

Which is expected at Siggraph in August ?

[SXX⁣]

Which is expected at Siggraph in August ?

Yeah. A lot of major Khronos announcements made on SIGGRAPH so it is it I think.

[ossuser]

The release notes of the current 15.5 Catalyst on amd.com doesn't mention the R9 300 series.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-arti...easeNotes.aspx

Also, with 'Manually Select Your Driver' no Linux option is shown.

If the new Linux Catalyst is AMDGPU backed, a lot of users would have to move from stable to cutting-edge kernel + deps only because of AMDGPU.
Or backported kernels + deps, not nice either.

Not AMD's fault, but it is going to be a big pita.

So, some thoughts on this.

1) A one-time "old-style" Linux Catalyst to bridge the kernel gap.
Add R9 300 (not Fury) pci-id's in current Linux Catalyst.
That should basically work (on the R9 200 level) as these cards are rebrands anyway, right ?
But we would miss out on the R9 300-specific features.

2) Wouldn't it be possible to re-commit the AMDGPU driver to, say, 3.16 kernel and upwards ?
That way the new AMDGPU backed Catalyst could at least support kernels from 3.16 and up.
Not sure about eventual dependancies, and not even mentioning the Linux kernel commit rules here ;-)

I think I still have to wait to see how things works out.
Not happy here.

[bridgman]

The initial Catalyst drivers for 300 series will not be AMDGPU-based.

Am I correct in understanding that you are "not happy" because you thought they would be ?

[duby229]

I was under the impression it's not all of them, only the VI cards? Or will it now be all of the 300 series cards?

[ossuser]

Ah, bridgman, that's quick.

Yes, you understand correctly, I thought it would be AMDGPU backed, as seen in the slides.



So, I can at least be sure the initial Catalyst driver will support my 3.16-based desktop ?

When will this initial Catalyst driver be available for Linux (or is it already available) ?

[dungeon]

So, I can at least be sure the initial Catalyst driver will support my 3.16-based desktop ?

I don't think so, that would require backporting whole amdgpu driver to that kernel.

amdgpu driver will start with 4.2 kernel and not yet with those closed source UMDs as an option... for now just look at it (as that slide shows) as All Open stack.