AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 Now Bundles Open-Source Components, Lets You Mix & Match Drivers

[agd5f]

Think of this as a packaged release for those that want to install the driver via packages rather than building it themselves or or using the in box drivers. This is mainly for workstation users and OEM preloads. The dkms part is common and supports both the all open userspace and the closed source userspace. Closed source OpenGL is focused on workstation applications. If you are more interested in gaming, use the open source OpenGL.

[DanL]

This is mainly for workstation users and OEM preloads.

I really wish the Pro installer came with a prominent warning that said something to that effect. I see too many n00bs try to install the Pro driver because they think they need it.

[perpetually high]

Michael you've been a busy bee today, thanks man.

This is getting so complicated! I think I need a fucking flowchart to understand all the options.

No kidding! Getting really unwieldy at the moment.

Since I haven't been on 16.04 LTS in months and am currently on Ubuntu 17.10, I can't utilize this new AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 package but glad to hear about the Vulkan driver finally open sourced. Sounds Like RadeonSI/Mesa + AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan is the golden ticket (though RADV is still awesome.) Thanks again to all the devs working hard for us.

I'm currently running the stock artful open-source stack and rockin' (pun intended) the ROCM 4.11.0-kfd-compute-rocm-rel-1.6-180 kernel on Ubuntu 17.10 so I can mine me some ether on my MSI RX 480 8B and everything's been super smooth (35 Mh/s).

$ clinfo | grep 'Platform Version\|Device Version\|Device Board Name\|Max compute units\|Max clock frequency\|Global memory size'
  Platform Version                                OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 17.2.4
  Platform Version                                OpenCL 2.0 AMD-APP (2508.0)
  Device Version                                  OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 17.2.4
  Max compute units                               36
  Max clock frequency                             1303MHz
  Global memory size                              16735563776 (15.59GiB)
  Device Version                                  OpenCL 1.2
  Max compute units                               36
  Max clock frequency                             1303MHz
  Global memory size                              8589934592 (8GiB)

Hopefully ROCM gets into mainline in 4.16 or so (I believe that's the plan), so I can enjoy the 4.15+ kernel with DC on Ubuntu 17.10 while using my preferred Mesa/Vulkan combo with OpenCL

[agd5f]

No kidding! Getting really unwieldy at the moment.

How so? I know it's fun to say that, because everyone loves to crap on AMD, but it's not really that complicated. With most modern distros, everything should mostly just work out of the box. If you want open source you can just use that or use a ppa or similar packages for bleeding edge stuff. Unfortunately, some components are not open sourced yet. Once they are, they will be handled just like any other open source component. If you need something that happens to still be closed source, or if you are using an older distro that came out before the hardware you want to use came out, you can use the packaged drivers starting with 17.50. They are basically an all-open base to which you can add closed source components if you wish. Supporting both packaged releases and upstream covers pretty much all the bases for the vast majority of use cases so you should have a relatively easy way to get a working driver.

[starshipeleven]

Sometimes I wonder what goes into certain people minds which otherwise look normal. Git snapshot. In an official supported driver. To customers.

Main difference with closed stuff is that with closed you can claim you had QA on your code. No wait, you can claim you had QA on your open code landed in the open git repo too.

Since there is no stable ABI, that is the realistically next best approach for a company that wants to play nice with the open source madness and stay responsible and sane.

Heh, I bet it would be easier to just track bleeding edge and not care about single distros at all, instead of having to adapt the driver to like 6 differently patched kernels (RHEL and SLES ones being the most patched).

[Luke_Wolf]

It is interesting that the installer refers to the "pro" opengl stack as legacy, seems to me that they're staging though not quite ready to act on the final shift of killing the old opengl driver and consolidating down onto the open source stack.

[sa666666]

It is interesting that the installer refers to the "pro" opengl stack as legacy, seems to me that they're staging though not quite ready to act on the final shift of killing the old opengl driver and consolidating down onto the open source stack.

Yes, the open-source OpenGL driver really has come a long way, in that it basically takes over the closed-source stack. Good to see it, I might add. Hope to eventually see this happen to all video drivers in Linux.

[gururise]

Does this mean we can use RadeonSI/RADV drivers with AMD's OpenCL drivers?

[Osmodivs]

What is the best setup for this drivers to work good on Blender 2.79?

[perpetually high]

How so? I know it's fun to say that, because everyone loves to crap on AMD, but it's not really that complicated. With most modern distros, everything should mostly just work out of the box. If you want open source you can just use that or use a ppa or similar packages for bleeding edge stuff. Unfortunately, some components are not open sourced yet. Once they are, they will be handled just like any other open source component. If you need something that happens to still be closed source, or if you are using an older distro that came out before the hardware you want to use came out, you can use the packaged drivers starting with 17.50. They are basically an all-open base to which you can add closed source components if you wish. Supporting both packaged releases and upstream covers pretty much all the bases for the vast majority of use cases so you should have a relatively easy way to get a working driver.

Trust me I didn't mean it like that. I'm super appreciative of the hard work you and the other developers do. I meant in the sense when I woke up in the morning and saw that one picture of the different flags to install the AMDGPU-PRO drivers (on top everything else we know about drivers on linux) I was like, oh man, this is getting to be too much, especially for someone that follows this stuff everyday. I can't imagine what the novice or inexperienced user feels like. But now that I've had some time to take it all in, not that bad all. I was messing with it earlier today. I ended up sticking with the 4.11 ROCM kernel and everything's running great.

And I agree with what you said in your post. Lots of flexibility right now depending on what kind of setup you're looking for. I get the support for the LTS 16.04 version over the bleeding edge distros. As for me, I couldn't be happier with my RX 480 on 17.10. And it looks things are only getting better!