Testing The Open-Source "RADV" Radeon Vulkan Driver vs. AMDGPU-PRO

[adler187]

Sorry, I probably missed that, can anyone tell, or link a discussion, about why Vulkan driver wasn't open sourced yet?

The answer you are looking for is in the post you already quoted: The legal review has not allowed AMD to open it up yet.

[bridgman]

so it is one developer for 8 years or half of developer for 16 years

Yep, or 2000 developers for one day, or 1/100th of a developer for 800 years, but if any of those were the plan I would have said that. Instead I said 8 devs for one year, because that's what the estimate was.

[Hi-Angel]

The answer you are looking for is in the post you already quoted: The legal review has not allowed AMD to open it up yet.

So… Do you know what do they review? Why is it taking so long? Why is this happening, given we're talking about a completely new driver which definitely was written with open sourcing it mind? Also, bridgeman mentioned some rewrites of the driver: again, what do they rewrite, they just created it!

That post tells nothing at all.

[bridgman]

So… Do you know what do they review? Why is it taking so long?

I wish everyone would stop talking about "legal review"; there is no such thing other than legal requiring engineering to confirm that we have rights to publicly distribute all of code and associated IP. The review and mitigation planning is done by architects, not legal staff.

The driver stack that implements Vulkan was written to leverage code and developer effort across multiple APIs and multiple OSes. In order to open source one piece of that stack (Vulkan on Linux) some pieces need to be rewritten so they no longer share code with those other OSes and APIs, at least not the ones which require non-public information to implement (unfortunately that is pretty much all of them).

Why is this happening, given we're talking about a completely new driver which definitely was written with open sourcing it mind? Also, bridgman (no 'e') mentioned some rewrites of the driver: again, what do they rewrite, they just created it!

You seem to be thinking that the driver was written from scratch just for Linux/Vulkan and for open sourcing, which is pretty much the opposite of what we have said. The Vulkan driver is part of a closed-source stack built on existing closed-source code which primarily supports non-open APIs and non-open OSes.

The stack was written with awareness that we would probably want to open source support for one of the dozen-or-so API/OS combinations in the future, and the code was structured to separate open-able from non-open-able to the extent that could be done without significantly slowing the overall project, but other than that it was a closed source project.

[Hi-Angel]

The driver stack that implements Vulkan was written to leverage code and developer effort across multiple APIs and multiple OSes. In order to open source one piece of that stack (Vulkan on Linux) some pieces need to be rewritten so they no longer share code with those other OSes and APIs, at least not the ones which require non-public information to implement (unfortunately that is pretty much all of them).

I still don't understand: you have GPU specification opened, and Windows API for writing drivers are open either. So what kind of non-public information the sources could possibly have?

[artivision]

I can see Vulcan coming everywhere on Linux, even on HD5-6K series and Fermi.

[bridgman]

I still don't understand: you have GPU specification opened, and Windows API for writing drivers are open either. So what kind of non-public information the sources could possibly have?

We have opened specifications for consumer PC GPUs, but we also have an active semi-custom business as well. If you look at Windows development kits I think you will find they are not "open as in open source", just downloadable under a "for your use only" license. Even so, in terms of OSes we support more than just Windows.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I can't talk about things that we keep secret.

[pal666]

if any of those were the plan I would have said that

i was arguing not with you, but with people imagining army of amd linux vulkan developers wasting their time waiting for lawyers doing legal review

[bridgman]

Ah, OK. Yeah, the review is quick... the hard part is dealing with the issues that come out of the review.

In this case we knew most of the issues going in, so dealing with them was more of a priority than any kind of formal review anyways.

[suberimakuri]

Geez, give the guy (bridgeman) a break.
It will be what it will be, he's obviously doing what he can.