AMD Is Hiring For Another Open-Source Linux/Mesa Developer

[WiR3D]

Sarcasm?

I doubt it, there's already a fresh round of rfc's out less than a week after that Hackfest and it's looking good. Still some debate about details but it's looking really good actually.

[ryao]

Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing
“Ecosystem”
"It is inadvisable to describe the free software community, or any human community, as an 'ecosystem,' because that word implies the absence of ethical judgment.
"The term 'ecosystem' implicitly suggests an attitude of nonjudgmental observation: don't ask how what should happen, just study and understand what does happen. In an ecosystem, some organisms consume other organisms. In ecology, we do not ask whether it is right for an owl to eat a mouse or for a mouse to eat a seed, we only observe that they do so. Species' populations grow or shrink according to the conditions; this is neither right nor wrong, merely an ecological phenomenon, even if it goes so far as the extinction of a species.
"By contrast, beings that adopt an ethical stance towards their surroundings can decide to preserve things that, without their intervention, might vanish—such as civil society, democracy, human rights, peace, public health, a stable climate, clean air and water, endangered species, traditional arts…and computer users' freedom.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words...html#Ecosystem

Dr. Stallman tends to hold extreme minority opinions. This would be one of them. I suggest ignoring it.

[cooperate]

People often do other things on Linux besides gaming ...

We have zink for that. They should’ve hired someone to work on that instead.

[skeevy420]

We have zink for that. They should’ve hired someone to work on that instead.

That was my thought, both gaming and professional. Take Catalyst and gaming on Windows, a lot of the Advanced Features don't work on anything above DX9. If AMD wired Zink, DXVK, D8VK, etc into Catalyst/AMDGPU then they'd be able to leverage Vulkan for every advanced feature they offer. AFAIK, nearly everything AMD offers is also offered in the D*VK and Zink options. The few things they don't offer can be added in via a built-in vkBasalt or ReShade.

Professional tools have the same problem as gamers where eventually we all end up with the XKCD Standards Scenario. One tool is OpenGL 3, another 4, another DX8, another DX11, another in Vulkan. That's not so bad until you have to use an OS, like macOS, that says, "Nah, we don't want to support that standard anymore." Because of that, it seems like it'd make more sense to pipe everything possible through a To Vulkan layer instead of trying to do it all natively. That would result in better long-term support and coverage as well as everything should have feature parity with one another regardless of the graphics API it was designed around.

If done right, thanks to the power of Open Source, that has the added benefit that every feature (the GUI) offered would be something that would work on Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and more.

[bridgman]

Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing
“Ecosystem”
"It is inadvisable to describe the free software community, or any human community, as an 'ecosystem,' because that word implies the absence of ethical judgment.
"The term 'ecosystem' implicitly suggests an attitude of nonjudgmental observation: don't ask how what should happen, just study and understand what does happen. In an ecosystem, some organisms consume other organisms. In ecology, we do not ask whether it is right for an owl to eat a mouse or for a mouse to eat a seed, we only observe that they do so. Species' populations grow or shrink according to the conditions; this is neither right nor wrong, merely an ecological phenomenon, even if it goes so far as the extinction of a species.
"By contrast, beings that adopt an ethical stance towards their surroundings can decide to preserve things that, without their intervention, might vanish—such as civil society, democracy, human rights, peace, public health, a stable climate, clean air and water, endangered species, traditional arts…and computer users' freedom.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words...html#Ecosystem

That seems like odd guidance to me, in the sense that I don't ever remember "ecosystem" meaning anything but the set of products (HW, code, services etc...) available for <something>. Using "ecosystem" to refer to people or community seems very odd. I agree we shouldn't do it, but I don't believe anyone ever has.

[eagleoneraptor]

For a lot of things we there are just general limitations in the ecosystem. We work with the ecosystem to enable them, but it often takes a while. We wanted to do AV1 support at launch, but VAAPI didn't support AV1 encoding when we launched the hardware. Even today with VAAPI support available, there is no support in any apps for AV1 encode outside of experimental patches. For other stuff like HDR we have been actively working with the community, distros, and compositors for years to try and nail down a solution everyone can agree on.

Do you think this is due to lack of resources or lack of organization/consensus inherent of how the ecosystem works?

[WiR3D]

Do you think this is due to lack of resources or lack of organization/consensus inherent of how the ecosystem works?

Yoh, I don't think there can be a single answer here, it will be pretty much a project specific answer.

For the kernel, new uapi designs are slow, but that makes sense in that context.

For vaapi, it could be this kind of situation, no one uses it yet so why add it?

For apps, generally I don't think the vaapi API's can be generic enough that app support would be automatic, so each app has to add support manually. And that comes down to "does anyone vitaly want this" and when enough people are interested then it hopefully goes ahead.

So you can't really target one aspect as an issue. Although for this example more self-describing apis that allow a bit better feature discovery could maybe speed up some parts of the gaps. But you will still need apps to handle the pretty user facing parts.

[jasonjulius1122]

Hello! I just want to say that, even in the midst of tech layoffs, AMD stands out as a company that is actively hiring, particularly in the Linux field. They recently posted job openings for developers who want to work on their open-source Linux graphics driver stack, specifically focusing on the AMD Radeon Mesa code. This presents a great opportunity for developers who are interested in contributing to open-source graphics drivers and working with Linux.

[michaelb1]

In a few minutes we are having a vPub v7 opensource online party, where we'll discuss a lot of opensource firmware/hardware topics - and in particular the " recent opensource firmware developments (OpenSIL) for new AMD PCs "

Both sound/video & text chat are available, and you're welcome to join our online party using the Jitsi links here- https://vpub.dasharo.com/e/7/dasharo-user-group-2

P.S. Our past events lasted like 12 hours, so there's a great chance we'll still be there by the time you join ;-)