The New AMDGPU Patches Show More AMD Developer Involvement

[souenzzo]

AMD be like

ooohh, let's sell some hardware that no one knows how to use.

Now all users will need to install the ConsoleOS to use it and play games all day.

[Deavir]

it is not true, but utter bullshit, since we are talking about videocards

For the record I wasn't saying that the indie comment was true, just wondering what the ratio of linux drivers devs for intel compared to linux hardware, and how it looks to amd's ratio. I took that as true because I thought an amd dev made that point sometime in my forum viewing history.

[Adarion]

AMD is like these indie devs who release Early Access games wich stay in alpha state forever

It seems you haven't followed the development of the freedom driver stack. I wouldn't call that alpha.

I am glad to see that more development power is coming to the free stack.

[Nille]

it is not true, but utter bullshit, since we are talking about videocards

That market is smaller and Intel sells much more GPUs, so its sill valid.

[xeekei]

Hopefully by the time the 14 nm GPUs arrive (or was it 16 nm?) the AMDGPU kernel driver will be mature and used by Catalyst. Then I can finally upgrade.

[mitcoes]

The gap at AMD's GPU between MS WOS and GNU/ Linux drivers must be closed as it is at Nvidia GPUs, and they must do it fast if they want a market share at Steam Machines with their excellent x86 SoCs price / performance for MS WOS that are not so good under GNU/Linux in the same terms.

[PsynoKhi0]

The gap at AMD's GPU between MS WOS and GNU/ Linux drivers must be closed as it is at Nvidia GPUs, and they must do it fast if they want a market share at Steam Machines with their excellent x86 SoCs price / performance for MS WOS that are not so good under GNU/Linux in the same terms.

Sounds good... A couple of things to remember:
- That doesn't happen overnight
- R&D money doesn't grow on trees, and I doubt AMD pay their devs in hugs and kisses
- The table is tilted

[profoundWHALE]

For the record I wasn't saying that the indie comment was true, just wondering what the ratio of linux drivers devs for intel compared to linux hardware, and how it looks to amd's ratio. I took that as true because I thought an amd dev made that point sometime in my forum viewing history.

Here's bridgman from the end of March, 2012

I am a "manager (or higher)" in AMD, and I do answer the question, but when I do people just fill my mailbox up with PMs, so I don't do it very often

The bottom line is that (as drag said) the cost/benefit numbers for spending more on Linux need to be favourable *and* be more attractive than the other requests which compete for the same incremental engineering budget.

Coming up with good numbers for Linux is complicated by a number of obvious issues :

- since most of the distros aren't sold, there are no sales numbers only download numbers, which aren't the same

- counting OEM preloads doesn't help to measure the end user OS distribution, partly because Linux users buy Windows preloads either to get the hardware configuration they want or to get the cheap copy of Windows for the cases where they may need to use it

- when SKUs *are* sold either with Linux or without any OS there is wild disagreement on what OS they end up with... pirated Windows, some form of Linux, or something else

- there's a "clustering" issue... if you use Windows most of the people you know probably use Windows too, so the status quo seems fine... but if you use Linux most of the people you know probably use Linux as well. That makes it obvious to you that companies are spending money in the wrong places and justifies you being sufficiently hostile to the people who *are* trying to good answers that they go away with a bad impression of Linux users and don't come back

- all supply chains tend to magnify demand for the highest volume SKUs and minimize or ignore demand for the lower volume SKUs, which has the effect of playing up Windows demand and downplaying Linux demand... and right now I don't think anyone has sufficiently good models to compensate for this

So far consumer Linux support from *all* HW vendors has mostly been a function of (a) how much "comes for free" as a consequence of doing engineering work for more tangible markets like 3D workstation, and (b) how much spare cash is washing around to "do nice things" whether they make money or not, and (c) how long each company has been working on the current driver stack and hence the "polish" that stack has been able to build up over the years. Point (c) in particular requires you to look at trends in order to get an accurate picture of what's going on.

Going forward there are some obviously interesting things happening. Android is growing in popularity, and is interesting to the embedded market as well as more obvious markets like tablets and smartphones, but the graphics stack is quite different from desktop Linux so the obvious question for you is "if we spend additional money on Android does that count as spending more on Linux even if there is no direct benefit for consumer PC Linux users ?".

We have also recently added two experienced developers (three actually, but since one was replacing Richard I'm only counting two) who IMO are and will be as productive or more over the next year or so than a half dozen developers hired and brought up to speed on the job. Just a thought...

If you wish to read more regarding that subject, it was easy enough as doing and advanced search for the keyword "money" and the user "bridgman". There is much newer stuff but I just grabbed the first one I saw.