RADV: A Community Open-Source Effort To Get Vulkan Working On Radeon

[bridgman]

When Canonical starts a new open-source project like MIR 99% of people here say "WTF double work". For a vulkan driver everyone is enthousiast.
That's fun.

I think the pushback for Mir was that it was a competing API standard, not a competing implementation.

[libv]

When Canonical starts a new open-source project like MIR 99% of people here say "WTF double work". For a vulkan driver everyone is enthousiast.
That's fun.

Well, at least this one is open vs closed, so i do not see as double work.

It is interesting though to see how Dave now is claiming victory over a situation that he himself helped create. If he hadn't been battling a proper open source driver for radeon back in 2007-2009, and siding with ATI on Atombios and whatnot (against SuSE, and against RadeonHD, and thus in the end against AMD itself), then we would've had much more open behaviour from AMD/ATI today. We would've had open register docs still, we wouldn't have had such dependence on AtomBIOS or DAL or whatever it is called now, and real open source developers would've started developing the open source AMD vulkan driver months ago, or at least actively supported it.

Well done.

[duby229]

I just don't see how it would be possible to code specifications for every AMD GPU combination that exists. AtomBIOS was certainly the right choice and I think DAL is too. I would just like to see amdgpu-pro be capable of running on a totally stock amdgpu kernel driver. It was kind of the point, and it's not working that way.

[Awesomeness]

do you trust code releases which draw one triangle on one card?

Sure. Why not? This code was not released with an announcement claiming the code could do more. "We messed around for a bit. The result doesn't do much except render one triangle. Here's the code." – Nothing dishonest or untrustworthy about that.

[schmidtbag]

Peter Hutterer has announced "libinput is done", at least in terms of its original goals.

Well... that's not something you hear every day in Linux news. But sure is great to hear regardless.

[starshipeleven]

When Canonical starts a new open-source project like MIR 99% of people here say "WTF double work". For a vulkan driver everyone is enthousiast.
That's fun.

1. there is no other open Vulkan driver for AMD, so it's not double work (unlike Mir)
2. a driver for AMD GPUs will benefit everyone with an AMD GPU (unlike Mir)

It's very cool that people keep not seeing the obvious and defending Canonical just because.

[ossuser]

I'm still puzzled, what are these IP-protected parts exactly ?

If those never get opensourced I wonder what we can expect from the opensource driver.
But that contrasts with the competitive performance of the opensource driver (vs closed AMD driver).

So, what are these IP parts ?

Also, I vaguely remember an AMD remark, that new designs would become less dependant on proprietary IP to prevent this kind of problem ?

[ossuser]

@Qaridarium: Ah, thanks, that explains a lot.

I was wondering if it had something to do with programming registers etc., (the hardware level).
Which I felt AMD is quite open about.

So, then it's up to AMD (and other devs) to find other ways to do the same things as in the closed code ?

[Passso]

1. there is no other open Vulkan driver for AMD, so it's not double work (unlike Mir)
2. a driver for AMD GPUs will benefit everyone with an AMD GPU (unlike Mir)

It's very cool that people keep not seeing the obvious and defending Canonical just because.

1. there is another work in progress Vulkan driver for AMD, so it's double work (like Mir)
2. a driver for AMD GPUs will benefit everyone with an AMD GPU (like Mir will benefit to everyone with Ubuntu and derivates)

It's very cool that people just watch some people being hated or blessed depending of their name/company.

Now to be precise I only defend projects and companies who invest a lot in Linux since years, are used by the majority of users and do not desserve to get asskicked every 3 comments or totally forgotten like :

- Opensuse
- KDE
- Ubuntu
- Intel
- NVidia

Anyway, back to subject. The project is cool.

[starshipeleven]

1. there is another work in progress Vulkan driver for AMD, so it's double work (like Mir)

No, AMD said they will eventually make one someday, not the same. AMDGPU (the open stack) isn't supporting Vulkan.

2. a driver for AMD GPUs will benefit everyone with an AMD GPU (like Mir will benefit to everyone with Ubuntu and derivates)

Mir is used only in Ubuntu with Unity, and in Arch/Gentoo Unity DEs. Mostly because unity is the only DE that cannot work without it, if you make any comparison to a driver that will be used by EVERY distro you're a complete moron.

It's very cool that people just watch some people being hated or blessed depending of their name/company.

It's still very cool that the only way to defend Canonical from the truth is coming up with total and utter bs..

And please note that I'm not even attacking Canonical here, I'm just pointing out that what you say is bs.

Now to be precise I only defend projects and companies who invest a lot in Linux since years, are used by the majority of users and do not desserve to get asskicked every 3 comments or totally forgotten like :

- Opensuse
- KDE
- Ubuntu
- Intel
- NVidia

I can kinda bear Ubuntu, they take retarded counterproductive ways that doom them to failure, but at least it is still opensource (not that it matters that much in the end), but how in the hell is NVIDIA even "investing a lot in linux" if their driver is mostly the same as in windows and not even opensource?

They do invest a lot in their own multiplatform driver as they make also drivers for Solaris and BSD-like stuff, but "investing a lot in Linux"?