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There's One Big Feature Left For The Radeon Linux Driver Left To Tackle In 2018

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  • There's One Big Feature Left For The Radeon Linux Driver Left To Tackle In 2018

    Phoronix: There's One Big Feature Left For The Radeon Linux Driver Left To Tackle In 2018

    AMD/Radeon had a stellar 2017 for Linux most notably with delivering working Radeon RX Vega open-source driver support at launch, AMDGPU DC finally being merged to the mainline Linux kernel, and the official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver now being open-source. Besides never-ending performance tuning, there's really just one major feature/area where the Radeon Linux graphics driver support is missing...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Though I don't have a problem with AMD working on something like this, I think there just needs to be a good graphical tool for Mesa drivers in general, other than driconf. The application could always have plugins that are vendor-specific. Making something like this really shouldn't be that hard, since it mostly just comes down to modifying text files. I would gladly make one myself but I don't know enough about the things you can tweak, nor do I have the hardware to do proper testing. I'm not aware of consistent, complete, or reliable documentation to help guide me in such a thing, so it's really best left to the Mesa devs themselves. Personally, I would rather them work on the drivers. Better drivers is (IMO) more important than a GUI tool that most people would never use anyway.

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    • #3
      Thanks for your information about this theme. You mentioned '.....rather than learning command-line controls ...'. Could you give me a hint where I can find information how to influence the behavior of AMD's graphic cards by terminal commands. Would me help a lot.
      Regards!

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      • #4
        It's been about two years since talking with AMD about having "Radeon Software Settings" for Linux. Back then they said they were investigating the possibility of open-sourcing their GUI control panel, which at the time had recently been rewritten in Qt5. They were optimistic about open-sourcing it in the future and in the mean time were working on exposing more of the driver's tunables and monitor-able information via kernel ioctls and other interfaces. Much of that information is now exposed nicely to user-space, but no Radeon Software Settings yet.
        If they do release, and support, open-source "Radeon Software Settings", then I'll be customer completely loyal to AMD!

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        • #5
          Is it possible with Mesa + Radeon to change HDMI levels for Wayland compositors? It seems that it's not possible for Intel (you have to use xrandr).

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          • #6
            i also want better support for video hardware acceleration (especially for raven) and upstreaming of all (amdkfd,llvm...) patches

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            • #7
              Well, I did not miss anything. I configure the things I need on the applications, and even on Windows I do not mess with the GUI that much, because I consider overcloking a GPU a complete loss of time and energy for the tiny gains in performance.

              Of course I understand other people have different needs than I, so what I want to say is, if a GUI for Linux is released, I probably will look at it one or two times and forget it exist.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by M@GOid View Post
                ...even on Windows I do not mess with the GUI that much, because I consider overcloking a GPU a complete loss of time and energy for the tiny gains in performance.
                Depends on the GPU. Sometimes it makes a pretty substantial performance difference (the Pascal cards seem to benefit a lot from OCing) meanwhile undervolting is often a good way to help reduce heat, noise, or [oddly] instability (take Vega for example). Considering both AMD and Nvidia are making it more and more difficult to modify the BIOSes, having proper tools to tweak clock settings is welcome IMO.
                Of course I understand other people have different needs than I, so what I want to say is, if a GUI for Linux is released, I probably will look at it one or two times and forget it exist.
                I can probably say the same for myself.

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                • #9
                  I've thought a few times about this, for example adding a GPU KCM to KDE System Settings. The problem becomes there is actually very little you would want in a control panel applet like that - display configuration is already taken care of, desktop compositing is already its own KCM, about the only thing you would be doing is fan profiles / temperature limits / software overclocking and enabling / disabling features (which again, like tearfree, are often found in other control applets already anyway).

                  Of those three though, fan control would be a really nice general KCM, but the issues with fan profiling in Linux are deeper than just having a GUI - there are kernel level issues and the fact very few hardware vendors implement or provide documentation of how to control system fans. Combine that with how bad temperature sensors can be, and neither are really practical until the hardware situation gets more consistent. Which will almost certainly be never.

                  And software overclocking is in the same boat. Overclocking monitors / the GPU require a lot of vendor specific functionality to be in great shape, and it seems a little lackluster to ONLY have GPU overclocking - which practically is actually the most likely to have in software. But the shitty condition of UEFI across the board makes ram / cpu tuning nigh impossible from userspace. So we could theoretically get a userspace GUI to OC your graphics card... which is really something Linux is quite lacking... but it would take a boatload of work, and since about ~2010 I've found overclocking to gradually become less and less useful in general.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by M@GOid View Post
                    Well, I did not miss anything. I configure the things I need on the applications, and even on Windows I do not mess with the GUI that much, because I consider overcloking a GPU a complete loss of time and energy for the tiny gains in performance.

                    Of course I understand other people have different needs than I, so what I want to say is, if a GUI for Linux is released, I probably will look at it one or two times and forget it exist.
                    It's not just about overclocking. Think of application profiles. You may want an easy method to set up games differently. E.g. in old games you want to override AA, vsync to have the best image quality, while in demanding games you may need the opposite just to get a few more frames. Changing all of these globally every time you want to play is a chore, and you can't always rely on in-game settings.

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