AMD "DAL" Being Renamed To "DC"

[Luke_Wolf]

but he didn't say that. he said it has been used for long time by proprietary drivers and that is true for some definition of "long"

Oh yes because 2015 was so long ago... No he meant the nonsense about it being open sourcing of the FGLRX component, as opposed to new code, in order to snipe at AMD.

Also to everyone else from the slides linked, DC is most likely "Display Core" as that's what's on there.

[schwarzman]

I love it. AMD published patches early on, patches they knew would never be accepted. They then listened to the comments and feedback, and improved their code accordingly. The way the community recommends FOSS to work. Publish early, re-iterate. I'm in awe.

I don't think AMD did it "right".

Disclaimer: I really like AMD's effort of building free drivers and I recommend AMD over Nvidia any time for Linux w/o binary drivers. AMD's developers are pretty responsive and build their stack properly (without too many hacks etc.)

However the DAL story is not a prime example of how to develop free code. They dumped about 100k lines of code in a single "release" event instead of releasing it incrementally (it must have taken many months, maybe even years to build that stuff). Even worse the code added new layers and abstractions to cater multiple operating systems. The latter doesn't fly with Linux (usually). If I had to guess I'd suspect that AMD's "well known" Linux developers were not too happy about that approach either.

So in the end I applaud AMD for their open source efforts but DAL was not done in the "publish early, re-iterate" style and a lot of problems stem from that.

[bug77]

Oh great, yet another name/acronym. So far I can count:
- fglrx
- radeonsi
- amdgpu(pro)
- dal
- radv
- something starting with R and ending with m (I think)

And I'm supposed to keep track of all of them and be excited every time I get a piece of news about each. Thanks Michael, I'll pass. This is as interesting as reporting Ford has changed their wind wipers, tires and whatnot.

[mibo]

... Thanks Michael, I'll pass.

This is great news.
None of your Nvidia-fanboy-posts will be missed.

[pal666]

Oh yes because 2015 was so long ago...

what makes you think one year wait can't feel long?

No he meant the nonsense about it being open sourcing of the FGLRX component

he didn't say fglrx, you said it

[pal666]

However the DAL story is not a prime example of how to develop free code. They dumped about 100k lines of code in a single "release" event instead of releasing it incrementally (it must have taken many months, maybe even years to build that stuff). Even worse the code added new layers and abstractions to cater multiple operating systems

because it was used on multiple operating systems, it was not developed (exclusively) for linux. because other systems have more customers which paid for more developers. now it is being redeveloped for linux and since linux has fewer developers, you are waiting

[sherw00d]

It's been referred to as "display code" in other articles and comments, so I'm guessing that's what it stands for.

[bridgman]

Oh great, yet another name/acronym. So far I can count:
- fglrx
- radeonsi
- amdgpu(pro)
- dal
- radv
- something starting with R and ending with m (I think)

Don't worry, we are thinking about you. We are retiring fglrx in order to make room in your tracking list for ROCm

[dungeon]

It's been referred to as "display code" in other articles and comments, so I'm guessing that's what it stands for.

Or DAL2 was written in C++ is now DAL3 rewritten in C, together with DAL3 > D3 > DC means the same... so from several points it make sense to put C in there even if it does not need to be acronym for anything clear

[bug77]

This is great news.
None of your Nvidia-fanboy-posts will be missed.

Ok, you asked for it: are you AMD users, in the absence of working hardware, occupying your time with tracking the history of each and every piece of the driver instead?

Seriously, this is all very important to developers, but completely useless for the end user.