Watch The Video About The State Of AMDGPU, Vulkan Linux Plans

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Watch The Video About The State Of AMDGPU, Vulkan Linux Plans

For those that weren't in Canada yesterday for XDC2015, the video is now online with the AMDGPU progress update and the initial talk about their Vulkan Linux work...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-XDC2015-Video

[dungeon]

I already accepted terms All Open and Pro - no confusion.

Last year there was Non-Pro which was kind of not mean actually anything this is better.

[asdfblah]

(...) we're gonna be open-sourcing our OpenCL and Vulkan stacks, eventually.
Wether the timing works out or not, to be open initially (...)

Can we interpret this as "it's already being developed for use with the OSS driver" and "it will be closed-source until the Vulkan API is released, and not for other reasons..."?

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Painful to listen to the two of them butcher the English language and come off as incoherent when making clarifications. It boils down to Contracts within their Professional and Consumer market lines.

Professional Lines: Customers have expensive and long-term support contracts within the use of very expensive CAD/CAM/FEA/CFD Markets and more that are mainly on Windows. They want long-term stability and are willing to pay for those features in OpenGL to maximize their investments. The Consumers for these Professional Lines include both the Users and Developers of high end Engineering, Architecture and other market space consumers. Autodesk, Dassault Systems, etc.

Consumer Lines: All the rest across all supported platforms, from OS X, Windows, Linux and BSDs. OS X will manage their own device driver teams and Windows co-ordinates with AMD for DirectX12/DirectX11 driver teams. Vulkan will be available with OpenCL/OpenGL/SPIR-V when it is mature and released. When AMDGPU is mature and ready for release the last area of concern will be the HSA Stack which will also have Open Source and Professional Line differentiation features, based upon support contracts: money talks, free beer walks.

MESA will get everything last as they should. Once it's passed legal MESA will catch up. End of story.

[smitty3268]

Can we interpret this as "it's already being developed for use with the OSS driver" and "it will be closed-source until the Vulkan API is released, and not for other reasons..."?

I don't think so. It sounds like they are taking their proprietary code in fglrx and reviewing it to make sure it can be open sourced. It does sound like it's all built around the amdgpu kernel driver though, if that's what you meant.

[chimpy]

Sounds like AMD Opencl was almost open sourced, but due to time constraints it wasn't. Does that mean it's right around the corner then? And what's going to happen to gallium Opencl?

[agd5f]

Our closed source Vulkan and OpenCL implementations will be open sourced. Whether the code review finishes in time for certain delivery schedules or not will determine whether they will end up being released as closed initially or not. It does not look like they will end up aligning at this point.

[newwen]

Our closed source Vulkan and OpenCL implementations will be open sourced. Whether the code review finishes in time for certain delivery schedules or not will determine whether they will end up being released as closed initially or not. It does not look like they will end up aligning at this point.

So, except for OpenGL, can we expect an almost all open source software stack for AMD GPUs?

[agd5f]

OpenGL will be open as well if you use the mesa driver.

[Amarildo]

Yes, make it all Open. I love it!

I was trying to live with the idea of having proprietary Catalyst in my system. I can't sleep, really. But after reading that AMD will make OpenCL actually open, I finally gave up on this idea. It doesn't matter how long it takes, as long as it doesn't take too much then I'm all in for AMD opening their software.

They should also open their firmware and microcode. They could sign such opensource software so that people know it's actually from them. This would benefit everyone: paranoids like me would completely trust AMD; we (as a community) could modify the firmware/microcode for our own benefit; AMD could get these community-made improvements and merge them into the signed images.
And even if we weren't allowed to modify them images, at least we would know for sure what they do.