Southern Islands AMDGPU Support Almost Ready To Roll

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Southern Islands AMDGPU Support Almost Ready To Roll

One of the features missing from Linux 4.8 is any Southern Islands / GCN 1.0 support in the new AMDGPU kernel DRM driver. However, it looks like this support ported over from the mature Radeon DRM driver will happen for Linux 4.9...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-SI-Almost-Ready

[Adarion]

Ah, who needs cursors?
Nice, very nice. I'm not eager to use the blob on top, though my GCN 1.1 GPU is just an APU and I won't have a huge benefit in running OpenCL on that little machine, but just seeing AMDGPU work on it and giving it a shot is a really nice option. I guess people with bigger and dedicated cards will welcome this new choice a lot.

[Xantress]

Great news! Good job Marek

[dh04000]

Hey, for those in the "know". Will the development of new hardware support for the Radeon-driver end now that AMDGPU driver is open source? I'm sure AMDGPU will drop driver support for gpu's older than 3 years, like they have in the past, so could Radeon-driver be a forked AMDGPU whose goal is too maintain the older gpu's after AMD moves on?

[drSeehas]

... Will the development of new hardware support for the Radeon-driver end now that AMDGPU driver is open source? I'm sure AMDGPU will drop driver support for gpu's older than 3 years, like they have in the past, so could Radeon-driver be a forked AMDGPU whose goal is too maintain the older gpu's after AMD moves on?

???
Why should AMDGPU drop driver support for GPUs older than 3 years when it just today added support for GPUs older than 3 years (SI)?

[dh04000]

???
Why should AMDGPU drop driver support for GPUs older than 3 years when it just today added support for GPUs older than 3 years (SI)?

Because history and pattern recognition.

[schmidtbag]

Hey, for those in the "know". Will the development of new hardware support for the Radeon-driver end now that AMDGPU driver is open source? I'm sure AMDGPU will drop driver support for gpu's older than 3 years, like they have in the past, so could Radeon-driver be a forked AMDGPU whose goal is too maintain the older gpu's after AMD moves on?

I don't see the older GPUs having their support dropped, just simply a lower priority (like R600, for example). Keep in mind these drivers aren't optimized for application-specific purposes. When Catalyst dropped support for a GPU, it was legitimately dropped for good - no support of any kind. It was so crippling that it wouldn't even work on newer kernels without a little extra effort. But the open source drivers don't share this problem.

I think it's possible that AMDGPU-PRO will drop support for older GPUs at some point, but by then there will likely be a successor to the AMDGPU driver, in which case AMDGPU-PRO doesn't need to be forked because it will have already been replaced.

[duby229]

Because history and pattern recognition.

Amdgpu is open source. It always was. There are still rage drivers in the kernel so I don't think that'll be a problem for many years.

[drSeehas]

Because history and pattern recognition.

When did open source drivers ever drop support for GPUs older than 3 years?

[jrch2k8]

Hey, for those in the "know". Will the development of new hardware support for the Radeon-driver end now that AMDGPU driver is open source? I'm sure AMDGPU will drop driver support for gpu's older than 3 years, like they have in the past, so could Radeon-driver be a forked AMDGPU whose goal is too maintain the older gpu's after AMD moves on?

right now:

Radeon + R300/600g: support anything usable but not GCN(VLIW), share lot of code with RadeonSI userspace mesa but it is its own thing
Radeon + RadeonSI: GCN class hardware 1.0/1.1
AMDGPU + RadeonSI: GCN 1.2+
AMDGPU + PRO blob: GCN 1.2+, no mesa, vulkan, opencl

after some kernel releases:

Radeon + R300/600g: support anything usable but not GCN(VLIW), share lot of code with RadeonSI userspace mesa but it is its own thing
AMDGPU + RadeonSI: GCN 1.0+
AMDGPU + PRO blob: GCN 1.0+, no mesa, vulkan, opencl

As you see non GCN will not dissapear and is not affected by the unification on userspace either since it doesn't use RadeonSI but r600g which is a different driver.

BTW AMD cannot drop support for anything if it is already in the kernel/mesa and since PRO blob uses this kernel driver exports(with some extra patches for now) they could only drop support on the closed driver by directly blocking it by PCIID but it will work perfectly fine with mesa either way.

The only reasonable way to drop support for hardware would be a new architecture far enough from GCN that will require a whole new kernel driver, even so in this case if mesa and AMDGPU already support GL 4.5/vulkan/etc by then it will just keep working since the driver cannot be removed from upstream