AMD Has A Vulkan Linux Driver, But Will Be Closed-Source At First

[HarlemSquirrel]

Why are there still closed source components?

Certain customers need certain key features today
‒
Workstation features
‒
OpenGL 4.5
‒
OpenCL
™

How do OpenGL 4.5 and OpenCL needs equate to needing closed-source drivers? Does no one else see this insanity?!?

[dungeon]

Tonga 285 here hopefully I will be alive to see an opensource full power vulkan and openGL 4.5 driver! Cause Catalyst is like our economics here in Greece... A total mess.
But please AMD show as some actual stuff, I mean AMDGPU does not have reclocking yet, Catalyst performs awfully on VI cards and you are talking about full Vulkan closed then open?
Seems like a midnight summer dream to me... I pray to be wrong here.

They did not talk only about Vulkan - that is what Michael quote as most interesting to him... there are words on Powerplay too:

http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2015...hou_amdgpu.pdf

[dungeon]

How do OpenGL 4.5 and OpenCL needs equate to needing closed-source drivers? Does no one else see this insanity?!?

Those are DONE by Catalyst team not by opensource linux team and Catalyst driver share those parts and support with Windows... so it is obvious why.

If you understand proprietary Catalyst stack you will know that OpenGL 4.5 there is much more then actual number shows... Mesa drivers simply does not implement everything you have with Catalyst, just most common features provided by the specs.

So even if Mesa have full OpenGL 4.5 there would be a still need for Catalyst... so that number is just number, that does not show us additional features it provides. For now numbers are runner up for opensource drivers, tomorow will be something else - be prepared

[peppercats]

It could be worse. You could be an NVIDIA user. Get back to me when they're finally providing open source drivers.

How is having a driver that works with new graphics cards considered 'worse' by anything other than Stallman standards?
Catalyst is a mess, mesa is always trailing and barely works with the highend cards.

[dungeon]

Catalyst is a mess

Only that it isn't a mess, it is just huge 20 millions of code

Can we made IP review of that and opensource it? It is like huge elephant in a room, that is not mess just he is huge

[bridgman]

re: IP reviewing and open sourcing the Linux Catalyst driver :

Finding something in a large piece of software like the proprietary driver reminds me of a short story I read a long time ago. If I remember correctly, it involved an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters, an angel cast out from Paradise and tasked with supervising said monkeys, and a block of granite a parsec or so on each side. Every 1000 years a small bird would stop by and sharpen its beak on the block, gradually wearing down the block and providing a way to measure the passage of time.

EDIT - found it - "Been a long, long time" by R. A. Lafferty. There is an xkcd comic in a similar vein, but it's not as good : http://xkcd.com/505/

Original topic was finding useful programming tips by searching Catalyst source, but my response fits to inspecting and sanitizing Catalyst source for open source release to an even greater extent. Back in 2007 we spent a fair amount of time trying to open source the Catalyst driver's r600 HW layer -- after quite a few weeks we had only made a small dent in the code.

[Guest]

How is having a driver that works with new graphics cards considered 'worse' by anything other than Stallman standards?
Catalyst is a mess, mesa is always trailing and barely works with the highend cards.

On the flip side, Mesa at least sticks to some standard publicly, whereas NVIDIA's driver is just a bunch of duct tape and hack fixes that just "happens" to work, hidden under a nice free PR shell

[dungeon]

bridgman

Tiger Team in a hunt for an Elephant

"The devil is real. I know, I built his cage." - Doom 3

[Marc Driftmeyer]

easy to understand, big names like nvidia, amd, intel, apple, m$ steal code and use others code and they simply can open the source code without having legal problems

What an effing joke. Apple has invested billions in open source, drove the vast growth of LLVM/Clang making it an alternative to GCC, turned CUPS into a quality Print System and much more. Your vitriol is a joke.

[chithanh]

How is having a driver that works with new graphics cards considered 'worse' by anything other than Stallman standards?

I think you are confusing two people.
Stallman is fine with buying (pre-Maxwell) NVidia cards: https://stallman.org/to-4chan.html
Linus Torvalds however...