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

[dungeon]

That is what every sane distro should include as wallpaper... OK, optional one

[duby229]

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...

I know a lot of people don't want to hear this but Stallman is an idiot. He doesn't like gentoo because they don't call themselves Gentoo GNU/Linux? What an arrogant dumbass. Why do people have to develop a hard stutter when they talk about desktop linux distributions? He's an ignorant fool.

EDIT: To be fair I have a similar issue with the name of a lot of KDE applications.

EDIT: Stallman is definitely at least partly to blame why linux distributions don't have a larger market share. He's wrong. Personally I think it's time for GNU toolchain packages to be replaced totally. That way we'll never have to see his nonsense ever again.

[dungeon]

@duby229

What in the hell you talking about here

[sabun]

I'm really glad that at least they are talking about it. The idea that only the Fiji chips will get support for Vulkan on Linux really sucks though, if that is found to be true in time.

I bought an R9 390 to be in the loop, but if buying even this current gen card doesn't allow me to be in the loop (yet God forbid, Windows users with the same card are in the loop), then my anger will be justified.

Regardless, it's all speculation until further details emerge. I'm just grateful that Nvidia isn't the only one with a day-one plan for Vulkan now. We need all of them to be in, so that the platform can grow.

[dungeon]

I'm really glad that at least they are talking about it. The idea that only the Fiji chips will get support for Vulkan on Linux really sucks though, if that is found to be true in time.

Well all GCN cards will have Vulkan support and here talks are only about amdgpu driver plans and that supports only GCN 1.2+ cards.

I bought an R9 390 to be in the loop, but if buying even this current gen card doesn't allow me to be in the loop (yet God forbid, Windows users with the same card are in the loop), then my anger will be justified.

R9 390 is GCN 1.1 so support is in radeon driver or usual Catalyst, but you will have Vulkan there too.

edit: for clearance if anyone wants to use amdgpu driver he should buy Fiji or Tonga cards or Carrizo APU.

edit2: AMD marketing names range cards per performance, not per generation!

[adler187]

Leveraging existing internal codebase

Sounds to me like they took their existing Mantle interface, converted it to Vulkan and will eventually be open-sourcing that. Nice to see they don't have to re-write it all. One might wonder why they don't do that for Catalyst -> Mesa, but I'm guessing the difference is that since Vulkan is based on Mantle and AMD developed Mantle themselves, the IP review is pretty straightforward, whereas it's probably much murkier for Catalyst, which came from ATI and probably licensed some OpenGL or other code from various places and such.

[dungeon]

Totally agree. That fool only does more harm than good. I think it's time we get rid of him for good. Fuck his GNU shit. Let's ban him from the Linux community. He's a loser anyway by any standards.

Oh my boy, go and kill some zombies or other possible 3D models instead without stutter

Watching currently what Marek has to say about stutter

[duby229]

@duby229

What in the hell you talking about here

Expectations, Pronunciation, and Arrogance. If that's not trying to convince people they need to stutter. It might just be better to call very distro GNU GNU/GNU.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/pronunciation.en.html

EDIT: For reference here is actual proper pronunciation.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/p...on/english/gnu

[Kano]

I am not fully sure if somebody wants an AMDGPU based Vulkan driver today. As 4.3 RC is already out there will be most likely no power management until 4.4 or later, this means best possible date around 6 months from now. Maybe AMD could provide that driver out of tree for dkms install and older kernels but that would not help much. As soon as the new stack is out - I expect more like Q2/16 than this year then they will most likely create a Win10 DX12 driver with dropped support for older chips and use the same hardware requirement for Linux. They could still provide a legacy fglrx driver but like it worked last time you had to collect lots of kernel driver patches yourself and sooner or later the driver could not be used with current Xorg core.

[duby229]

I am not fully sure if somebody wants an AMDGPU based Vulkan driver today. As 4.3 RC is already out there will be most likely no power management until 4.4 or later, this means best possible date around 6 months from now. Maybe AMD could provide that driver out of tree for dkms install and older kernels but that would not help much. As soon as the new stack is out - I expect more like Q2/16 than this year then they will most likely create a Win10 DX12 driver with dropped support for older chips and use the same hardware requirement for Linux. They could still provide a legacy fglrx driver but like it worked last time you had to collect lots of kernel driver patches yourself and sooner or later the driver could not be used with current Xorg core.

I expect somebody is gonna have to port the radeon kernel driver to support the vulkan userspace. I don't have any guess on if or when that might happen though.

I don't think it'll take that long for amdgpu to develop into a more functional state though. Sure it will be done incrementally, but I think it will be better sooner than you think it will be.