Southern Islands AMDGPU Support Almost Ready To Roll

[pal666]

I was talking about the closed AMD driver dropping support and whether the AMD made AMDPRO would do so also.

this article is about adding si support to kernel amdgpu driver. closed amd driver shares same kernel amdgpu driver with mesa, it was not moved from closed to open, it was moved { from nowhere to closed and open } in amdgpu mode. (old closed fglrx didn't use amdgpu kernel)

[starshipeleven]

Again, why no edit button?

Micheael has temporarily removed edit button for non-Premium users because vBullettin did not filter post edits, and spambots were abusing this by posting an innocuous post, then editing it into spam.

[pal666]

AMD makes AMDGPU, not Mesa. So it stands that their development model with AMDGPU = FGLRX.

amdgpu is mesa's kernel driver.
=fglrx is catalyst

[pal666]

JESUS, this guy knows what I'm talking about. The rest of you take note.

take note of what? in 2018 closed driver will be dominated by mesa

[starshipeleven]

The design of AMDGPU is different.
The closed part in it is a userspace thingy that replaces Mesa/Gallium (for AMD cards) and provides their features, while the hardware support is still handled by the open part, shared with the fully-open driver that offloads to Mesa/gallium instead.

This design allows it to keep running older cards with the same blob that runs the newer ones, because now the blob isn't also providing hardware support, but just features.

God bless AMD marketing in secula seculorum, I got names wrong again.

AMDGPU is the name of the open driver offloading to Mesa userspace.

AMDGPU-PRO is the hybrid driver made by AMD by splicing AMDGPU open driver with the userspace components of flxglr or whatever was called the old proprietary driver.

[starshipeleven]

@everyone: come on, he phrased it very wrong (because he got confused by the VERY VERY CLEAR naming of AMD's drivers), but most of the people here focused on nitpicking his mistakes instead of answering his actual questions.

[pal666]

there are cases where users want the blob driver

they have whole blob os for that

The open source driver just wasn't in as good a shape back then.

but it is now, and will be perfect(compared to blob that is) by 2018

[pal666]

it was dark there for about 3 years and no one notice it nor fixed it

because nobody used it, obviously

[duby229]

God bless AMD marketing in secula seculorum, I got names wrong again.

AMDGPU is the name of the open driver offloading to Mesa userspace.

AMDGPU-PRO is the hybrid driver made by AMD by splicing AMDGPU open driver with the userspace components of flxglr or whatever was called the old proprietary driver.

This shit is overly complicated....

Waaay back in the day ATi hired a guy to write a driver for their FireGL cards. That developer called it fglrx. In 2007 AMD ported Catalyst to linux and they decided to retain the old drivers naming convention for the kernel module. In 2016 AMD released amdgpu, which replaces catalysts fglrx kernel module.

[dungeon]

because nobody used it, obviously

Nope, bug was even filled 2 years before that... but no one fixed it