GCN 1.0 Southern Islands Seeing AMDGPU Improvements With Linux 4.10

[Staffan]

Other than Vulkan (which doesn't really have any native games yet) what do you feel you are missing from the radeon-based stack that ships in 16.04 and which can be updated with new kernels + userspace packages from upstream ?

The radeon-based stack is the supported one for SI, not the in-development amdgpu-based one.

It doesn't work, for one. At least on Gentoo. I've tried to enable everything related to radeonsi in the kernel but it just panics on bootup with "unable to mount root fs". The very same config just without the radeon settings works just fine so I don't understand why it suddenly can't find the root fs but there it is and it's practically impossible to debug.

[bridgman]

It doesn't work, for one. At least on Gentoo. I've tried to enable everything related to radeonsi in the kernel but it just panics on bootup with "unable to mount root fs".

I don't understand - radeonsi is a userspace driver (technically a pipe driver in mesa) and has nothing to do with kernel. The radeonsi userspace code works with both radeon and amdgpu kernel drivers, via the radeon and amdgpu winsys drivers also in mesa:

pipe drivers: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/me...allium/drivers (r300, r600, radeonsi)

winsys drivers: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/me...gallium/winsys (radeon, amdgpu)

The kernel drivers are also radeon and amdgpu... and for now we are still recommending use of the radeon kernel driver.

Can you give me an example of what you were trying to do re: radeonsi in the kernel ?

[bridgman]

Currently I miss the catalyst control panel. It had its flaws. However, a comprehensive gui is needed in order to be informed and tinker with the capabilities of the hardware. Also I like to be able to install and update the drivers my self, preferably by downloading a single package with a gui installer, so that I do not depend on what the distribution provides.

There is some discussion about adding back a control panel, although most of the initial feedback we received was to focus on exposing controls via standard Linux mechanisms (eg sysfs), which we are doing, and allowing DE's to write a generic control panel instead. Progress on generic control panels does not really seem to be happening though (driconf is still the standard after ~15 years) so we may have to revisit that.

You can install and update drivers yourself today via repos from Canonical and other third parties (oibaf, padoka) but I understand the desire for a Windows-style installer (it seems to be the one thing that even some people who hate Windows want to keep, despite it being contrary to pretty much every Linux convention out there). You will probably see some improvements there, although we will also probably get more flak than support for everything we do in that direction.

Another thing is that my card used to be quiter with the catalyst drivers.

OK, that is worth looking into. Which GPU do you have ?

More in general I would like the game developers to have drivers that they can rely on, so that they do not only support nvidia. For this driver will have to have qualities like completeness, stability, and user friendliness.

This is happening with a fair amount of success. You can look at Feral's recent work for some good examples. Our main focus here has been the open source drivers, and that is where we are seeing the most support from game developers.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...sa-AMD-Support

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...er-Mesa-Ubuntu

Over the last few years (while the open source drivers were catching up in terms of functionality and performance) users pretty much needed to have bleeding-edge drivers in order to play the games they wanted. Now that the drivers are largely caught up there is a place for regular updates that are more stable than the tip of the development branch but also not 6-9 months old. I guess the question is whether automatic updates along those lines would be sufficient or whether you still want more of a Windows-style driver install model.

[Hibbelharry]

Working on computers with SI grahhics hardware everyday, i must say i'm satisfied. I don't do anything too special on those, since these are machines used in our office for Software Development Tasks not specially involving Heavy 3D Development, but for our needs the machines are stable, reliable and just working with good performance. I think the "give us a closed source driver with ALL features" just abstracts the fact that noone tries to define exactly what "all" is. I see and admit that OpenCL support still seems to be in a messy situation for OSSS, but that doesn't hurt me.

There is some discussion about adding back a control panel, although most of the initial feedback we received was to focus on exposing controls via standard Linux mechanisms (eg sysfs), which we are doing, and allowing DE's to write a generic control panel instead. Progress on generic control panels does not really seem to be happening though (driconf is still the standard after ~15 years) so we may have to revisit that.

For what reason? I'm dualbooting a gameloader OS from Redmond at home, for that kind of games which would take time and experiments to get them running in linux. I'm a more lazy type of person concerning my entertainment ideas, so this either stems from the fact the games not beeing available on steam, having no linux port at all or plain beeing old or dumb. In years of it's existence, I'm opening up the Windows Radeon Controlpanel about once a year. While I saw Radeon Settings on windows does have a nifty look, impressing me for about 5 minutes with a lot of bling these days, i don't see any especially useful functionality, so I don't care. I think AMD should take care of issues when people miss functionality, but people always seem to just miss a controlpanel for the sake of beeing a controlpanel, not stating which buttons they miss

By the way: We are also still using some machines at work equipped with nvidia cards, for example if an order got wrong, the machine beeing older (we all know nvidia was the way to go in former times...) or in notebooks where we might have no choice. We're using thinkpads and docking stations for people which need to be agile in some way, so if lenovo decides to use nvidia in a new laptop series, we'll have nvidia chips or non working docking stations... I dislike praying to god for nouveau beeing useful enough to get the nvidia blob installed after a new install. I dislike praying that nvidias legacy crap drivers will compile with newer kernels. I never use the nvidia control panel for linux, because there is no functionality I care of, neither do the users. If that one is deemed "rather good", well...

You can install and update drivers yourself today via repos from Canonical and other third parties (oibaf, padoka) but I understand the desire for a Windows-style installer (it seems to be the one thing that even some people who hate Windows want to keep, despite it being contrary to pretty much every Linux convention out there). You will probably see some improvements there, although we will also probably get more flak than support for everything we do in that direction.

Please, don't do that. This will foul people into thinking the windows "Download, Setupe.exe, next, accept, next, next, NO FREAKIN TOOLBAR, next, next, finish) workflow of things is good in anything. Things should just work. Distributions take care of that. Updating drivers should be done in the background, without needing interaction. Distributions should take care of dependencied and inventory. We're getting there, and that is pure userfriendlyness. I think people coming from windows, having no big setup packages feel naked in some way, but that is nothing amd shoulkd take care of. It's a misconception of the users.

More in general I would like the game developers to have drivers that they can rely on, so that they do not only support nvidia. For this driver will have to have qualities like completeness, stability, and user friendliness.

Completeness for a game developer means beeing able to use current APIs, which is a mostly solved problem. You get OpenGL 4.5, which is the latest version of that Standard, you get OpenGL ES, you get vulkan support. We're in a rather good situation these days, some people do even have choices instead of beeing with no option.

In terms of Stability, there also isn't too much too desire these days, my R9 Fury card at home runs well using the OSS Stack. I might be lucky, but that's the way I experience the current stack, and i think more and more people are experiencing the same.

In terms of friendliness i don't miss anything. I'm tweaking in game gfx options to my needs and then never care again. Things just work. What could anyone desire more?