My Three Hopes For AMD's Open-Source Stack The Rest Of 2017

[DrYak]

The driver is distribution-agnostic.

In theory it's distribution-agnostic in the sense that they don't design a driver targetting specifically Ubuntu or RedHat.

In practice, it is. To use the proprietary drive, you need a shim - the nv module - to be compiler and loaded.

Linux Kernel is constantly under development (well, that's actually one of the key point of opensource...)

Because it's a shim, nv is developed outside of the normal linux kernel tree and isn't developed by the regular linux kernel devs.
(As opposing to the closed source AMDGPU-PRO driver, which relies on the opensource amdgpu.ko kernel module, the same module that the opensource driver uses too, and which is part of the vanilla linux kernel tree.)

Regularily, the compilation of NV will break. Because some change in the Linux kernel affects it, but as it is developed out-of-tree, it won't receive fixes on time for the Linux release. You have to wait the the Nvidia linux devs to catch up with the linux kernel evolution.

This makes it particularly difficult for rolling distro, which tend to very quickly jump to newer kernels. Nvidia doesn't want to spend the resources tracking every single last kernel to make sure that nv compiles successfully, just in case that some distro somewhere might decide to switch to it (tough this could be considered understandable).

Usually, you're better off using a big distribution like Ubuntu or RedHat/CentOS, because chances are that Nvidia will have better tested with their kernel.
Or use a distribution which uses a kernel version that is identical to the one used by big distros.

---

My self, I've decided to drop the Nvidia binary, and rely on the opensource Nouveau with my laptop (running OpenSuse Tumbleweed - a rolling distro).
(With an Nvidia GPU soldered on the mother board. Not an MXM module that I could hope to somehow replace).
At least I can get the latest version of the code, both for GFX drivers, and everything else that gets updated with kernel releases.
And I can tolerate the occasional quirk of nouveau bugs on some revisions (due to nouveau being nearly entirely developed by reverse engineering, with very little input from Nvidia).

[aufkrawall]

I'm on a rolling release distribution (first Tumbleweed, Arch since March) for six months now, and afair I've never had to miss out on a stable kernel or X update because of the Nvidia driver.

I dislike the Nvidia Linux driver for various things, but the support for new kernels and X versions surely is better than of amdgpu-pro.

[geearf]

I'm on a rolling release distribution (first Tumbleweed, Arch since March) for six months now, and afair I've never had to miss out on a stable kernel or X update because of the Nvidia driver.

I dislike the Nvidia Linux driver for various things, but the support for new kernels and X versions surely is better than of amdgpu-pro.

That's not really true, the whole Arch community had to wait on 4.11 because of nvidia drivers not compiling with it...

[Almindor]

I just bought a full AMD desktop machine, ryzen 5 with rx580 to support AMD in their OSS efforts.

Things like not open-sourcing the vulkan driver make me really nervous. It seems to me AMD is schizophrenic and can't decide between an OSS strategy and a vendor-lock-in one.
The whole AMDGPU closed driver thing is also very concerning and kinda proves their schizophrenia.

If you want to open source you go ahead and do it. The only thing that can legitimately delay the actual act is legal issues if your code is not yours to give.

[Sevard]

They did for me and others.

Not for all of them. I know few people who had similar issues (especially with older, low end cards) and also weren't able to install NVIDIA blob on Kernel 4.10.

Then you're wrong on Tumbleweed as well, they still haven't rolled Qt 5.8.

Qt 5.8 breaks KDE Wayland session:

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/524854-What-happened-to-Qt-5-8

https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-58423

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=375539

And this is the second big issue of Arch - Wayland is broken there almost all the time.

The driver is distribution-agnostic.

It isn't since it isn't kernel, xorg and Mesa agnostic. If you cannot update kernel, because you must wait for driver to be compatible with newer version, then it may be quite big issue. Especially when something is broken in kernel that you currently use.

[agd5f]

I just bought a full AMD desktop machine, ryzen 5 with rx580 to support AMD in their OSS efforts.

Things like not open-sourcing the vulkan driver make me really nervous. It seems to me AMD is schizophrenic and can't decide between an OSS strategy and a vendor-lock-in one.
The whole AMDGPU closed driver thing is also very concerning and kinda proves their schizophrenia.

If you want to open source you go ahead and do it. The only thing that can legitimately delay the actual act is legal issues if your code is not yours to give.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. What "AMDGPU closed driver thing" are you talking about? The only thing that will remain closed source is our workstation OpenGL driver. Everything else is open source or will be soon (Vulkan). In the case of vulkan, we are in the process of separating out any components we can't open source (e.g., 3rd party stuff) and replacing that with something we can and then making sure we can restructure everything so that we can still maintain a unified code base going forward that can support multiple OSes and easily integrate community contributions. While doing all of this, we also have to add support for new asics and features and OS versions.

[aufkrawall]

Can you tell the public if this is planned to happen this year?

[Almindor]

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. What "AMDGPU closed driver thing" are you talking about? The only thing that will remain closed source is our workstation OpenGL driver. Everything else is open source or will be soon (Vulkan). In the case of vulkan, we are in the process of separating out any components we can't open source (e.g., 3rd party stuff) and replacing that with something we can and then making sure we can restructure everything so that we can still maintain a unified code base going forward that can support multiple OSes and easily integrate community contributions. While doing all of this, we also have to add support for new asics and features and OS versions.

AMDGPU-PRO is not opensource as far as I know.

You pretty much confirmed that it's a 3rd party issue then with Vulkan I suppose. Also I'm talking in present tense, "will" and "eventually" are very long term when it comes to AMD/ATI drivers, it's something like 10+ years now.

Don't get me wrong, I know you guys are doing the best you can and I value it, hence buying a pure AMD box, which btw. goes to my nephew and when I get back to Canada I'll buy an even beefier one for myself too. It's just that for 5+ years now the whole Linux/AMD picture has been "almost there" while actual performance was pitiful compared to windows. Things are finally starting to look almost there which is great.

[agd5f]

AMDGPU-PRO is not opensource as far as I know.

As I said before only the workstation OpenGL driver is closed source. When you download the PRO driver, the full kernel driver source is included since it's set up as a dkms driver.

You pretty much confirmed that it's a 3rd party issue then with Vulkan I suppose.

It's not just 3rd party IP, it's also restructuring our code so that we can properly maintain a single code base and handle community contributions. Independent of the open source vulkan work, but also a requirement for open sourcing vulkan is to switch to using the LLVM shader compiler. As John noted on another thread, OpenCL (via ROCm) has already switched.

[torsionbar28]

I gave up last week and sold the RX 480 I bought nearly a year ago for a minimal loss (thanks Ethereum mining boom) and managed to get a GTX 1070 for a pretty good deal to replace it. DAL/DC support was crucial for me, and trying to live with the patched kernel was a huge pain. I was never able to get AMDGPU-PRO working either on Arch Linux after several attempts at downgrading the kernel/xorg and compiling the million other snowflake dependencies it has. Just a black screen with not very helpful logs every time :/

While I am super impressed with how far the open source drivers have come, I think I'll hold off on anymore AMD GPU purchases (at least for Linux systems) until this is all ironed out.

^ Weak sauce. I just sold my GTX Titan and replaced it with an Rx 480. I couldn't be happier. Everything "just works" with this Rx 480 and all my Steam games perform extremely well. No more proprietary driver and kernel module hell, having to recompile nvidia shit every time a kernel update comes out. I've been on nvidia for many many years, but after such a positive experience with this Rx 480, I'm an AMD convert!