AMD Planning For Launch-Day Vega Open-Source & AMDGPU-PRO Support

[L_A_G]

Looks like AMD does not really want to sell them ...

Or then it could just be the fact that the direct-to-consumer market for boards smaller than mATX is a rather niche one... Try to remember that unlike Intel, AMD doesn't make or sell it's own motherboards, they rely completely on third party OEMs in this regard. A third party OEM capable of making a board like that isn't going to do so unless they themselves really want to sell a machine using one nor will they be ready to make one to be sold to other vendors and directly to consumers unless they're guaranteed enough orders to cover all the costs of bringing it to market.

Seeing how AMD has lost quite a bit of ground to Intel over the last few years it's only natural that OEMs will be rather pessimistic when it comes to their assessments on how many AMD boards they'll be able to sell and as a result end up rather wary of niche AMD products.

I personally hope Zen will be a breakaway success not only because I plan on buying one (I've already bought the DDR4 RAM and I ordered a new computer case last week), but also because the general CPU market has gotten VERY stale since Intel gained market dominance. Intel really needs a kick up the backside and be forced to stop wasting silicon by cramming in integrated GPUs in to $250 GPUs like the 6600K and charging people extra for being able to overclock their CPU.

[Slartifartblast]

Looks like AMD does not really want to sell them ...

Or perhaps the public doesn't want to buy them.

[Michael_S]

I had an R9 270 that kept causing kernel panics and random restarts. I had it in two different motherboards and three different Linux installs, newer kernels, didn't matter. Then I put it into a machine with Windows, set up the right drivers... and the same things happened. Now I know why the thing was a screaming deal used. Oops.

I switched to an RX 480 on Elementary OS (which is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS). I used the Mesa PPA and Ubuntu optional newer kernels. Still waiting for the DAL merge to get audio over HDMI. But that's a complex topic and I'm not going to blame the AMD drivers team for having a patch they consider ready get rejected. I thought about trying to build my own kernel from https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/ but I think I'll take the lazy way out and use separate speakers and wait. Otherwise performance is excellent, and Starcraft 2 on Wine is very pretty.

[haplo602]

Or then it could just be the fact that the direct-to-consumer market for boards smaller than mATX is a rather niche one... Try to remember that unlike Intel, AMD doesn't make or sell it's own motherboards, they rely completely on third party OEMs in this regard. A third party OEM capable of making a board like that isn't going to do so unless they themselves really want to sell a machine using one nor will they be ready to make one to be sold to other vendors and directly to consumers unless they're guaranteed enough orders to cover all the costs of bringing it to market.

Seeing how AMD has lost quite a bit of ground to Intel over the last few years it's only natural that OEMs will be rather pessimistic when it comes to their assessments on how many AMD boards they'll be able to sell and as a result end up rather wary of niche AMD products.

I personally hope Zen will be a breakaway success not only because I plan on buying one (I've already bought the DDR4 RAM and I ordered a new computer case last week), but also because the general CPU market has gotten VERY stale since Intel gained market dominance. Intel really needs a kick up the backside and be forced to stop wasting silicon by cramming in integrated GPUs in to $250 GPUs like the 6600K and charging people extra for being able to overclock their CPU.

There are no AM3+ ITX boards except maybe one (the socket was too big for ITX). There were at one time a lot of FM2+ ITX boards, there's still a lot of AM1 ITX boards. So I do not think the demand is not there.

Also look at the laptop side of things. HP f.e. is making a convertible x360 tablet/laptop with (ok only single memory channel) the top of the line APUs, but only sells them in the US. Same with the AM4 based HP PC. Only available at Costco ... It is up to AMD to push their partners to get products into customer hands. And with Bristol Ridge, the availability is mostly US only. Either there's a production problem, or this is a conscious decision on AMD part.

[Slartifartblast]

There are no AM3+ ITX boards except maybe one (the socket was too big for ITX). There were at one time a lot of FM2+ ITX boards, there's still a lot of AM1 ITX boards. So I do not think the demand is not there.

Also look at the laptop side of things. HP f.e. is making a convertible x360 tablet/laptop with (ok only single memory channel) the top of the line APUs, but only sells them in the US. Same with the AM4 based HP PC. Only available at Costco ... It is up to AMD to push their partners to get products into customer hands. And with Bristol Ridge, the availability is mostly US only. Either there's a production problem, or this is a conscious decision on AMD part.

Yesteryears tech, that's why.

Ye cannae change the laws of physics! I've got to have 14nm !

[L_A_G]

There are no AM3+ ITX boards except maybe one (the socket was too big for ITX). There were at one time a lot of FM2+ ITX boards, there's still a lot of AM1 ITX boards. So I do not think the demand is not there.

I wouldn't be so sure when AMD's has had a continued low market share for several years. Hell, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if sales of AMD ITX boards didn't meet expectations and as a result the companies who made them, decided not to make any more ITX boards for AMD chips.

Also look at the laptop side of things. HP f.e. is making a convertible x360 tablet/laptop with (ok only single memory channel) the top of the line APUs, but only sells them in the US. Same with the AM4 based HP PC. Only available at Costco ... It is up to AMD to push their partners to get products into customer hands. And with Bristol Ridge, the availability is mostly US only. Either there's a production problem, or this is a conscious decision on AMD part.

You've got the relationship between AMD and OEMs the wrong way around. All AMD can do is try to sell their chips to OEMs and hope to convince them to sell the kind of devices they they intended the chips for. With Intel breathing down AMD's neck they simply don't have the leverage to pressure OEMs to sell and make the kind of devices they want to and with the rather low margins on OEM sales AMD doesn't have the money to market the products for the OEMs either. What kinds of products OEMs offer to end consumers and where they offer them is more or less completely up to the OEMs themselves.

All AMD can do right now is offer OEMs the best products that they can and if OEMs don't want to make products using those products, there's not much AMD can do about it. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me the least bit if Intel was up to their usual tricks and giving OEMs discounts on their chips for not selling machines with AMD chips. Intel has done this once in the past already and got a fairly hefty fine from the EU for it.

Complaining and blaming AMD for this is like complaining and blaming companies who make electric motors are the reason why we don't have more all electric electric cars from major manufacturers being sold worldwide.

[haplo602]

I wouldn't be so sure when AMD's has had a continued low market share for several years. Hell, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if sales of AMD ITX boards didn't meet expectations and as a result the companies who made them, decided not to make any more ITX boards for AMD chips.



You've got the relationship between AMD and OEMs the wrong way around. All AMD can do is try to sell their chips to OEMs and hope to convince them to sell the kind of devices they they intended the chips for. With Intel breathing down AMD's neck they simply don't have the leverage to pressure OEMs to sell and make the kind of devices they want to and with the rather low margins on OEM sales AMD doesn't have the money to market the products for the OEMs either. What kinds of products OEMs offer to end consumers and where they offer them is more or less completely up to the OEMs themselves.

All AMD can do right now is offer OEMs the best products that they can and if OEMs don't want to make products using those products, there's not much AMD can do about it. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me the least bit if Intel was up to their usual tricks and giving OEMs discounts on their chips for not selling machines with AMD chips. Intel has done this once in the past already and got a fairly hefty fine from the EU for it.

Complaining and blaming AMD for this is like complaining and blaming companies who make electric motors are the reason why we don't have more all electric electric cars from major manufacturers being sold worldwide.

I have the relationship correct. It is up to AMD to ensure consumer availability they do benefit from it the most (the OEM can still go back to selling Intel products). There were a lot of boards introduced and demoed last year August/September from all the major manufacturers (MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, ASrock). So far I have only found the low end Asus one. Where are the others ? Don't tell me they poured R&D money into products they do not intend to sell ?

The only conclusion is that there's not enough chips to sell. Or that everybody is waiting on Zen. Either situation is not beneficial to AMD.

[bridgman]

Stop playing that game.

I'm not sure what game you are talking about, can you be more specific ?

What kind of support did AMD offer for their latest lineup on Ubuntu 16.04 on launch?

Full open source driver support in the install images, but -pro driver with 16.04 support didn't arrive until the 16.30 release in June, so users requiring closed-source userspace features (mostly OpenCL these days) would have had to stay on 14.04 or 15.10 until June as we recommended.

As near as I can figure you are calling that "unsupported" while I am not ?

[bridgman]

In fairness, everyone used to hate fglrx, but there's much more love for amdgpu (assuming it's the kernel module where the bulk of that code would fit). But I agree that if the bulk of AAA titles released for GNU/Linux this year support Vulkan anyway, Crossfire would be relatively pointless by this stage (well, unless Gallium on Nine could tap into it... and maybe they'll release a Gallium on Eleven at some point). Having said that, it remains to see how many Vulkan ports we'll get this year, which are the only titles that could currently do multi-GPU without Crossfire, so time will tell.

Even without Vulkan adoption, putting a lot of work into Crossfire on Linux only makes sense if the game developers/porters do the same, and there is not much in it for them. The situation is different from a few years ago, where multiple high end cards were required to get decent frame rates (so game developers were motivated). These days a single high-end card is usually sufficient.

Addressing bugs, adding features, and general QA improvements.

No argument about bugs & QA, I was only asking about features.

website blah blah

No argument there. We need to make it easier to find & download Linux drivers. My thinking was to do less "tell us what you have" and more "here are your options, pick one, recommendations below".

But say we ended up with amdgpu-pro and it happened to be correct. That installer is simply horrible! You can't skip a version (I think I jumped a point release when going to 16.50) and the shell script installer somehow got me into dependency hell. Something to do with multiarch IIRC. Anyway, it took me 10 minutes to figure it all out, purging a bunch of packages, doing multiple reboots, etc. to get everything back in working order. This is on 16.04 - which I'm only using because that's what AMD and Valve officially support - and it was a complete disaster!

And speaking of the driver installer... even if it were to work correctly, it's not intuitive at all. It's unlike any other installer I've ever used. I don't understand why it creates a local unsigned repository (which spits out ugly warnings whenever you do apt-get update)... what's the point? It doesn't seem to be syncing with AMD servers, so it just seems like a waste of space, and it's confusing.

And if you've set a different umask to the default (such as 0027)... good luck! I'm not sure if it's still an issue in the latest installer, but many of the installers will just fail in some horrible way and you have to go in and manually fix a bunch of things up.

Okay, but that's just a packaging issue. Different department and all that probably.

I hadn't heard about issues when skipping a version, if so that's something we need to look at for sure.

AFAIK the installer is an intermediate step towards being more integrated with distro packaging systems but I haven't been following the plans there.

Interesting point about umask; I hadn't heard about people changing it from default normally but maybe that happens more than we think. Are you suggesting we force permissions on installed files even if that disagrees with umask, or that we fail if we can't install with <umask> permissions and have the driver work ?

But then you get these kernel panics, and you go to freedesktop.org to subscribe to the bug in question only to see countless other kernel panic bugs related to AMDGPU, but all different to the one you experienced, and wonder... why are we worrying about improving a few FPS here and there when all these people who have paid hundreds of dollars for AMD GPUs are having their system crash? That should take top priority, surely?

That one *is* a different people thing - this isn't about "stability vs performance" just about "raising GL level vs performance". People working on stability are still working on stability.

I was going to complain about the docs, pointing out that there is no information on how to enable FreeSync, but I see that has since been addressed (here: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-arti...-IN-LINUX.aspx). But there was no information (that I could find at least) about how to enable FreeSync when the drivers first supported the feature. I only knew how to activate it because of a comment you posted to an article on Phoronix a few days after, when one would think the information should have been available upon release.

This is a brand new driver so everything really is being created from scratch. I think you will find those concerns go away fairly quickly.

I could go on, but you get the point. There's just so many things where I have to wonder just what somebody at AMD was thinking... but ultimately I think it comes down to a lack of QA and a lack of focus on fixing up problem areas. I'm guessing AMD's not big on GNU/Linux usability testing at the moment (at least not using personal computers of the people being tested), but that would likely help tremendously.

Since I've upgraded my Debian OS install with Mesa to 17.0.0-rc2, and amdgpu crashes have gone way down - but are still a problem every now and then. On my other Ubuntu installation, the AMDGPU Pro stack is also much improved in terms of stability as of late, in my experience. Definitely more stable than the full free software stack. But surely Mesa bugging out shouldn't be causing kernel hangs anyway?

Sorry for the rant. I appreciate what AMD's trying to do which is why I own AMD cards and am prepared to put up with issues every now and then like the ones mentioned, but there is so much room for improvement in the user experience - it's hard for me to see why performance still seems to be getting 90% of the focus.

Performance is not getting anything like 90% of the focus, and it never did other than in the news. Our Mesa developers (all ~2 of them) were splitting time between GL level support, bug fixes and reliability; the only change is that the time they spent on raising GL level is now going into performance, while work on bug fixes and stability is continuing.

I suspect the real issue here is that performance gains are much more news-worthy than bug fixes and stability improvements.

[bug77]

Full open source driver support in the install images,

Interesting definition of "full support" considering in your next feature you mention a missing feature.

but -pro driver with 16.04 support didn't arrive until the 16.30 release in June, so users requiring closed-source userspace features (mostly OpenCL these days) would have had to stay on 14.04 or 15.10 until June as we recommended.

These days it may be "mostly OpenCL" (because what's HDMI audio, nobody would want that), but the situation the same when 16.04 launched?

And with the open source driver in catching up mode, you're telling me AMD never intended to have the Pro driver available together with Ubuntu 16.04 launch?


Signing off this thread, cause I sound way too bitter, when all I wanted to say is I hope your plan comes through this time.