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

[Passso]

If it is distro-dependent it is still not NVIDIA's merit.

Basically you can make it works on any laptop, it will just be harder on strange/non-usual implementation.
It is true that NVidia did not all the work for all distros like for their drivers but do not quote me out of context: I was just writing that it actually does work because they made available some stuff that enable it and some open source projects built primusrun on it.

[Nobu]

Sort of back on topic...

Michael airlied bridgman With latest git ("vulkan-radeon-git", mesa, etc.) from lcarlier's mesa-git repo on arch, Vulkan (sort of) works in RetroArch on an RX 480 using the xmb menu driver. With the rgui menu driver it just alternates between black and white, either way it keeps writing "amdgpu: amdgpu_cs_query_fence_status failed." to the console. Haven't tested ParaLLEl yet because I don't have any roms yet.

W00t!

[drSeehas]

... Sony ... use the amd closed source driver in PS4.

There is an AMD closed source driver for BSD?

[drSeehas]

yes but only for sony ps4 internal use.

Why only for Sony PS4 internal use?
Because of missing GCN drivers you can only use nVidia on FreeBSD.

[bridgman]

Because of missing GCN drivers you can only use nVidia on FreeBSD.

That was a temporary thing AFAIK - BSD used to be pretty close to Linux in terms of graphics support (and that was one of the arguments for following an open source strategy rather than rebuilding fglrx into something that could run on a wider range of OSes) until the lead graphics developer went back to real life and BSD graphics support started to fall behind.

Seems like that is changing now though, which is great to see...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...RM-Matches-Git

[drSeehas]

... until the lead graphics developer went back to real life and BSD graphics support started to fall behind.

This was before the arrival of GCN.

Seems like that is changing now though, which is great to see...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...RM-Matches-Git

This is initially for intel and very experimental at the moment.
A long way for GCN on FreeBSD.
At least today, if you want to do some real work on FreeBSD, you still need a nVidia card.

[starshipeleven]

There is an AMD closed source driver for BSD?

Ahem, there is an AMD closed driver for the SoC used in the ps4 that runs in the Sony's fork of BSD.

That's not exactly the same.

[bridgman]

This was before the arrival of GCN.

I don't think GCN actually made much difference w.r.t. driver porting, although KMS and TTM certainly made things more complicated. So I agree that "things happened around that time which made it much harder for BSD to keep up with Linux graphics", just don't think GCN was a factor since nearly all of the associated complexity was in userspace drivers.

This is initially for intel and very experimental at the moment. A long way for GCN on FreeBSD.
At least today, if you want to do some real work on FreeBSD, you still need a nVidia card.

That surprises me... my impression from earlier articles & blog posts was that BSD had caught up as far as being "a few kernel versions back" months ago. Maybe that was for Intel only ?

[bridgman]

Ahem, there is an AMD closed driver for the SoC used in the ps4 that runs in the Sony's fork of BSD.

That's not exactly the same.

I would go one step further and say "there is a closed driver for the AMD SoC used in the ps4...", which is even more different.

[drSeehas]

... my impression from earlier articles & blog posts was that BSD had caught up as far as being "a few kernel versions back" months ago. Maybe that was for Intel only ?

This and DragonflyBSD, not FreeBSD. DragonflyBSD is in more need as it dooesn't have the proprietary nVidia driver like FreeBSD has.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics#AMD_.2F_Radeon_Graphics