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

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I'll be thrilled if we get the same UI and feature set as Windows.

[GI_Jack]

We've spent enough time thinking if we could, and less time thinking if we should.

The answer is no. I welcome the FOSS efforts of AMD, and my next system will be exclusively AMD, CPU and GPU.

That said, I am not looking forward to windows gamers coming to Linux. We have enough of our own problems, and we really don't need them in our community.

Did I say community? Oh yeah. GNU/Linux nerds do things like write bug reports, submit patches, and actually contribute technically. For all the drama in this community, we don't have a problem with community members calling the cops on eachother and goading the police into shooting them over petty arguments. We have just that, petty arguments that most of the time don't result in violence or property damage.

So we bring in Windows gamers who hate everything about Free software, hate having to contribute back, and look down on those who do. In addition, they have a hardcore consumer mindset that they deserve to have their ass wiped because they have lots of money to throw around. Not only will they not contribute, they will be actively hostile to community members, and expect to be catered to.

So, good barrier to entry is tuning kernel variables? Thats not that hard, it just requires a bit of reading public documentation, and has enough of a learning curve it will scare off anyone who frets having to actually learn something. This will be fine, as graphics support will still be available for professionals running workstations, rend farms, super computers, and other machines designed to be setup and maintained by highly skilled professionals, like the UNIX that Linux replaces.

This brings up the next point "The Year of the Linux Desktop" is a terrible mistake. This doesn't contribute to the community.

[zoomblab]

I't has been almost 2 years since using linux almost exclusively. "Windows gamers transitioning to Linux would expect rather than learning command-line controls" The one command i alway's forget: glxinfo | grep 'version',lol.I have been coming to phoronix everyday reading news about mesa. It's been frustrating but some how rewarding in a strange way. I have learned so much it has been an adventure.

2 years ago I choose opensuse leap 42.1 and installed fglrx for my 2 r9 280x's. I had opengl 4.5, opencl, vulkan crossfire in theory. With Sidefx houdini apprentice I was making fireballs with opencl with second card. Autdesk maya educational installed. Unreal engine 4.13 worked. Ferel interactive games did not support amd cards at the time that used fglrx. I upgraded to opensuse 42.2 and used mesa 11 . Feral Interactive games worked except alien isolation that required mesa with opengl 4.3 .Sidefx had artifacts and still does and Unreal Engine 4.15 . I upgraded to tumbleweed for newer kernel and mesa 13.Ue4 4.15 mesa 13 was not supported. I switched to fedora because redhat was hiring mesa developers.
Ue4 now worked (Fedora also patched blender bugs). Mesa amdgpu drivers are not supported with sidefx houdini. No amdgpu-pro driver. Back to windows...

I made another computer with Kde neon 16.04.3 and nvidia geforce gtx 660.

I feel you. I gave away my 7870 which was bought back then specifically for the promise of open source drivers. I never became satisfied with the drivers situation though. In the first years AMD focused on catching up with older generations of chips. By the time they finished with that GCN 1 was already legacy technology and AMD had to focus on newer generations.

Personally, even though I acknowledge the progress that has been made, I am not convinced with the strategy that AMD has taken. I would even say that the situation with classic fglrx was better from a consumer point of view. Fglrx was a single package, easy to install and upgrade (even though they were usually late to support of latest ubuntu releases) and was user accessible with GUI and all. Currently there are multiple drivers at play, each with different pros and cons, not easy to install and no way to inspect and configure the hardware. The above message from shmerl is indicative of what I am talking about.

In the end the green camp is providing a better experience consumer wise. This is something that AMD should focus next IMHO.

[leipero]

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.

Yes, those 'big gains' by overclock are complete nonsense and untrue since idk ATI Radeon 9550 or something, that GPU is the last one you could get close to two times better performance by overclocking. When you are in situation 'doesn't run well' 10-20% is nothing really as you said, you need X times performance increase in those cases, and that can't be done by overclocking for a while now..., so I'm with you on that one, overclocking is just a waste of hardware and time in 99% of cases.

On topic, I do not need such GUI, but it would make life easier for lot's of people, especially gamers, but creation of such tool (especially if is multi-vendor tool) is not as easy task as it seems to be, it requires a lot of driver configuration knowledge as an starting point, than toolkit of choice and so on...

Adding custom resolutions and refresh rates should be fairly easy, and I'm suprized there's no such utility, or... at least it was easy durring X11, now with wayland it might be 'a bit' harder (need for binary EDID loaded by initramfs or boot loader), and general settings for open drivers are quite universal.

[M@GOid]

The GUI that I use for monitoring temps and clockings on KDE is Ksysguard (I also start it with Ctrl+Esc, so I got everything in one app). I create a new tab and with the right menu I chose what items I want to monitor. Usually I create a graph for temps, one for clocks and one for fan speeds. Works great and I do this since KDE 4.

PS: I also have to do install lm-sensors before and do a "sensors-detect" to get all the sensors available for monitoring.

[eydee]

I think it is needed for the gamer audience. I don't consider myself a gamer but people who are will miss it. This alone is reason enough :-)

It's nice to have a GUI for managing everything related to a GPU. Display settings etc. too. Even Intel IGPs have a control panel on windows, and they have absolutely nothing to do with gaming. Think of doing a presentation, and having to connect your laptop to a projector and stuff like that. Being more user friendly never hurts.

[tiwake]

mainlined OpenCL drivers is the last thing, not whatever GUI sillyness... need functionality over pretty. Folding@Home and my videocard waits for this day to happen.

[bridgman]

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.

Why not just improve driconf ? It has been open source for almost 15 years, and the worst thing anyone seems to be able to say about it is "I don't like the way the GUI looks".

[rene]

never understood the need of this windows style graphic setting ui, for professional use I vastly prefer software / driver properties and attributes, and tweaking /sys values, :_/

[agd5f]

If you want something like this, it's something the Linux community needs to tackle in general. We used to support a settings GUI on fglrx and it was painful to support because every desktop environment stored display state differently and constantly changed their interfaces. Updates to GNOME or KDE broke the GUI constantly. Users would try to use the GUI on some slightly less mainstream desktops and it would not always work leading them to blame the driver rather than the desktop. Add the various wayland environments to the mix and things get even trickier.