Much wow, New "AMDGPU" Kernel Driver

[monstercameron]

 

 

Alex Deucher of AMD has taken the floor at XDC2014, which got underway today in France to provide an update on the company's new unified open-source driver strategy. Compared to what I originally reported earlier in the year when breaking the news, there's some notable changes but overall this is an exciting endeavor for AMD Linux customers with the open and closed source AMD GPU drivers going to share the same (open-source) Linux kernel driver.

 

source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_bordeaux_strategy&num=1

source 2: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgwODA

source 3: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgwNzY - kinda related but these are their HSA plans.

 

commentary/flames: AMD going ham, all in support for steam os! possible future support for android[surface flinger] and wayland/mir?

[vengeancek70]

Yay steam os! Interesting to see what they are going to do with the possible android support.

[monstercameron]

Yay steam os! Interesting to see what they are going to do with the possible android support.

possible android support wasnt mentioned, that was just my commentary[based on an old promise they made.]

[vengeancek70]

possible android support wasnt mentioned, that was just my commentary[based on an old promise they made.]

Aha, too bad. Still hope they will do something with it, seems like an interesting idea.

[Opcode]

I would expect Nvidia to follow suit now. Linux will soon favor AMD based cards due to issues being patched and performance improvements being committed constantly by the community.

[LAwLz]

At first I thought this mean that Radeon would become Open Source. I was sadly disappointed.

So the benefit of this is that even when you're using Radeon you are still mostly using open source components (basically everything except for OpenGL)? Wish they had just taken the extra step and make everything open.

[monstercameron]

I would expect Nvidia to follow suit now. Linux will soon favor AMD based cards due to issues being patched and performance improvements being committed constantly by the community.

I doubt it, nvidia hates anything open, and aggressively so. Also the community doesnt provide much performance improvements but they certainly help with integration.

[monstercameron]

At first I thought this mean that Radeon would become Open Source. I was sadly disappointed.

So the benefit of this is that even when you're using Radeon you are still mostly using open source components (basically everything except for OpenGL)? Wish they had just taken the extra step and make everything open.

everything is already open but the catalyst blob [due to possible patent and/or licensing issues] will still be close. The advantage of the coming changes are better kernel and xorg support aswell as faster gpu enablement.

[LAwLz]

I doubt it, nvidia hates anything open, and aggressively so. Also the community doesnt provide much performance improvements but they certainly help with integration.

Yeah they are so aggressive about it. That's why they recently helped Nouveau, right?

Sure they didn't do much, but saying that they are aggressively against open source is just bullshit.

[monstercameron]

Yeah they are so aggressive about it. That's why they recently helped Nouveau, right?

Sure they didn't do much, but saying that they are aggressively against open source is just bullshit.

I don't is nvidia has any opensource tools? or does anything in the open. Also why do you think linus fingered Nvidia [teehee], even kernel interface is closed. They are aggressively opposed to the gpl or any opensource license and do their darnedest to obfuscate and hide their code. Even developers comment about this, they dont know how the nvidia uarch works on a smaller scale [especially compared to gcn]. This isn't a bash comment about nvidia but I believe they are very opposed to open source and openness.

[Syntaxvgm]

Great AMD, great, Now please fix your windows drivers too. You are holding yourselves back so much. You make great GPUs. Sad thing is they are almost as bad as the linux drivers. In fact worse, because the generic linux ones work great

[Misanthrope]

I'll hold my enthusiasm for when a good Linux driver for amd is available and offering at least close to the same Windows performance, feature parity and legacy cards support

[LAwLz]

I don't is nvidia has any opensource tools? or does anything in the open. Also why do you think linus fingered Nvidia [teehee], even kernel interface is closed. They are aggressively opposed to the gpl or any opensource license and do their darnedest to obfuscate and hide their code. Even developers comment about this, they dont know how the nvidia uarch works on a smaller scale [especially compared to gcn]. This isn't a bash comment about nvidia but I believe they are very opposed to open source and openness.

Nouveau is a fully open source driver (as in, no binary blobs unlike what you will get with AMD drivers) for Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia has basically been ignoring it since it got started but has recently helped them a bit by giving them some documentation to help the development. Nvidia also patched in support for the K1 in Nouveau themselves which is nice.

I would like a citation on that "they are aggressively opposed to the gpl or any open source license". There is a difference between not actively supporting, and being against something. To me it seems like Nvidia are mostly just ignoring open source, not actively fighting against it like you are saying.

[DigitalHermit]

AMD going open source... Looks like they're starting to do stuff in the name of progress...

[monstercameron]

Nouveau is a fully open source driver (as in, no binary blobs unlike what you will get with AMD drivers) for Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia has basically been ignoring it since it got started but has recently helped them a bit by giving them some documentation to help the development. Nvidia also patched in support for the K1 in Nouveau themselves which is nice.

I would like a citation on that "they are aggressively opposed to the gpl or any open source license". There is a difference between not actively supporting, and being against something. To me it seems like Nvidia are mostly just ignoring open source, not actively fighting against it like you are saying.

The AMD foss driver is fully open source ie no black box blobs. Also nvidia only gave them a card and are willing to answer some question. Also they are patching nouveau for their tegra soc.

 

details here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYwNzY

tegra patches: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYwOTE

 

However as I said, nvidia are hostile to opensource and openness. Nvidia has never published code for their gfx cards to the fully community driven foss driver.

read this http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-gpl-linux-driver,18572.html

 

again this isnt saying the nvidia is bad at graphics, I am just saying that they are hostile towards opening any code or info, whether is be for a legitimate reason or not.

[yoloswag9000]

Nouveau is a fully open source driver (as in, no binary blobs unlike what you will get with AMD drivers) for Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia has basically been ignoring it since it got started but has recently helped them a bit by giving them some documentation to help the development. Nvidia also patched in support for the K1 in Nouveau themselves which is nice.

I would like a citation on that "they are aggressively opposed to the gpl or any open source license". There is a difference between not actively supporting, and being against something. To me it seems like Nvidia are mostly just ignoring open source, not actively fighting against it like you are saying.

 

Nvidia will require firmware, too: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc5ODA

Pretty much every device in your PC does. Your CPU, your GPU, your disks, your mainboard, probably even your keyboard and mouse. Not a good things, but that's how it is.

 

The "documentation" is simply for the driver to work on the most basic level because every linux ships with the Nouveau driver and if your desktop doesn't show up because of the Nvidia GPU you've got in there, it doesn't look good for Nvidia.

 

Just to give you an impression on how much work AMD and Nvidia put into the "radeon" and "nouveau" drivers:

 

$ git log --author="@Nvidia.com" --pretty=tformat: --numstat| grep drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau | awk '{ sum1 += $1; sum2 += $2 } END { print sum1; print sum2 }'

2049

475

$ git log --author="@AMD.com" --pretty=tformat: --numstat| grep drivers/gpu/drm/radeon | awk '{ sum1 += $1; sum2 += $2 } END { print sum1; print sum2 }'

123350

27862

 

First line is "lines added", second line is "lines removed".

 

And yes, it actually happened, they were aggressively opposing the GPL and told the developers of DMA-BUF to change the license from GPL to something less restrictive: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2012-October/028842.html

[yoloswag9000]

The AMD foss driver is fully open source ie no black box blobs.

That's simply wrong. You need a proprietary firmware to do anything more than basic video output. On debian you don't even get the firmware on the default repositories because it is non-free.

On the good site, however, that the radeon driver uses the firmware, so you understand at least a part of it and you can modify the firmware which makes it possible to replace/hack it.

 

The new nvidia chips are coming with firmware signing, which means that the reverse engineered firmware from the nouveau project won't be accepted by the card.

[monstercameron]

That's simply wrong. You need a proprietary firmware to do anything more than basic video output. On debian you don't even get the firmware on the default repositories because it is non-free.

On the good site, however, that the radeon driver uses the firmware, so you understand at least a part of it and you can modify the firmware which makes it possible to replace/hack it.

 

The new nvidia chips are coming with firmware signing, which means that the reverse engineered firmware from the nouveau project won't be accepted by the card.

I stand corrected, I forgot about the firmware blob but then again it isnt apart of the driver. The firmware is loaded into the gfx chip not into the kernel [that was an assumption, unless I am mistaken?].

[yoloswag9000]

I stand corrected, I forgot about the firmware blob but then again it isnt apart of the driver. The firmware is loaded into the gfx chip not into the kernel [that was an assumption, unless I am mistaken?].

True. It really doesn't matter from a security perspective, however. The GPU can simply copy data over the PCI bus into the main memory via DMA and take control over the OS.

 

I'll hold my enthusiasm for when a good Linux driver for amd is available and offering at least close to the same Windows performance, feature parity and legacy cards support

The performance of catalyst is comparable between Windows and linux. The problem is that catalyst has bad OpenGL paths which have horrible performance. If an engine use OpenGL 4.4 and doesn't fuck up you'll get pretty good performance. No engine does, though, because intel on linux is at OpenGL 3.3 so the targed version for most engine is GL 3.3.

 

For the legacy part you have the open source radeon + mesa driver. It works really well on my radeon hd 4850, even better than catalyst. Radeon + mesa is pretty usable even for relatively new chips.

 

So, in the end there is not much they can do performance wise. Engines have to start using modern OpenGL and hopefully OpenGL Next makes all of that a little bit easier.

[LAwLz]

The AMD foss driver is fully open source ie no black box blobs. Also nvidia only gave them a card and are willing to answer some question. Also they are patching nouveau for their tegra soc.

 

details here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYwNzY

tegra patches: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYwOTE

 

However as I said, nvidia are hostile to opensource and openness. Nvidia has never published code for their gfx cards to the fully community driven foss driver.

read this http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-gpl-linux-driver,18572.html

 

again this isnt saying the nvidia is bad at graphics, I am just saying that they are hostile towards opening any code or info, whether is be for a legitimate reason or not.

Well maybe AMD have changed their open source drivers but last time I checked it contained binary blobs. I can't find my original source so for now you'll have to do with Stallman.

 

Regarding graphics accelerators for PCs, ATI mostly cooperates with the free software movement, while nVidia is totally hostile. ATI has released free drivers.

However, the ATI drivers use nonfree microcode blobs, whereas most of nVidia's products (excepting the most recent ones) work ok with Nouveau, which is entirely free and has no blobs.

Thus, paradoxically, if you want to be free you need to get a not-very-recent nVidia accelerator.

I wish ATI would free this microcode, or put it in ROM, so that we could endorse its products and stop preferring the products of a company that is no friend of ours.

I disagree with Stallman on a lot and I think it's stupid that he wants it on a ROM, but I trust him when it comes to which products contains binary blobs.

 

Yes, Nvidia gave them a card and they were answering questions AND they released some (quite limited) documentation (about for example the DCB). For Nouveau who have had to reverse engineering everything, that could be pretty helpful. I haven't really been following the development since that was announced but I remember reading that Nvidia were planning on releasing more documentation regarding for example the BIOS. Hopefully they followed through with that but yeah, I don't know if they did.

 

The thing about them never having published code is just bullshit. Just look at their SoC side. They have given very strong support for open source drivers for the K1 among other things.

I can see that you are picking your words very carefully as well, since you specifically said "fully community driven foss drivers" instead of just any open source drivers. I guess you did that because you know that Nvidia did maintain the open source driver called "nv", is that correct? It sucked ass and they have abandoned it but still.

[patrickjp93]

True. It really doesn't matter from a security perspective, however. The GPU can simply copy data over the PCI bus into the main memory via DMA and take control over the OS.

 

The performance of catalyst is comparable between Windows and linux. The problem is that catalyst has bad OpenGL paths which have horrible performance. If an engine use OpenGL 4.4 and doesn't fuck up you'll get pretty good performance. No engine does, though, because intel on linux is at OpenGL 3.3 so the targed version for most engine is GL 3.3.

 

For the legacy part you have the open source radeon + mesa driver. It works really well on my radeon hd 4850, even better than catalyst. Radeon + mesa is pretty usable even for relatively new chips.

 

So, in the end there is not much they can do performance wise. Engines have to start using modern OpenGL and hopefully OpenGL Next makes all of that a little bit easier.

Um, bullshit. Intel is on OpenGL 4.2. Read the Intel C Compiler documentation for Linux.

[IdortMasterRace]

Much wow

 

Stop it.

[monstercameron]

Well maybe AMD have changed their open source drivers but last time I checked it contained binary blobs. I can't find my original source so for now you'll have to do with Stallman.

I disagree with Stallman on a lot and I think it's stupid that he wants it on a ROM, but I trust him when it comes to which products contains binary blobs.

 

Yes, Nvidia gave them a card and they were answering questions AND they released some (quite limited) documentation (about for example the DCB). For Nouveau who have had to reverse engineering everything, that could be pretty helpful. I haven't really been following the development since that was announced but I remember reading that Nvidia were planning on releasing more documentation regarding for example the BIOS. Hopefully they followed through with that but yeah, I don't know if they did.

 

The thing about them never having published code is just bullshit. Just look at their SoC side. They have given very strong support for open source drivers for the K1 among other things.

I can see that you are picking your words very carefully as well, since you specifically said "fully community driven foss drivers" instead of just any open source drivers. I guess you did that because you know that Nvidia did maintain the open source driver called "nv", is that correct? It sucked ass and they have abandoned it but still.

I have never heard of nv foss driver from nvidia. Also the soc enablement patches were very basic, 

 

 

he patches published today supply libdrm-tegra with a lightweight API on top of the Tegra DRM driver's kernel interfaces. Libdrm is effectively the interface for communication between the kernel DRM drivers and the user-space components (namely the respective X.Org DDX driver and Mesa driver). With the NVIDIA Tegra libdrm support, Thierry Reding has implemented basic EXA 2D acceleration support in the xf86-video-opentegra driver.

source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYwOTE

I also never said they have never patched nouvaeu for tegra but that they have never done so for their graphics cards.

[yoloswag9000]

Um, bullshit. Intel is on OpenGL 4.2. Read the Intel C Compiler documentation for Linux.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/docs/GL3.txt

yeah, no.

edit: also, that is so stupid that I didn't understand how stupid it is. Why should I read the "Intel C Compiler documentation" if I want to know which version of OpenGL intel supports on linux?

[patrickjp93]

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/docs/GL3.txt

yeah, no.

edit: also, that is so stupid that I didn't understand how stupid it is. Why should I read the "Intel C Compiler documentation" if I want to know which version of OpenGL intel supports on linux?

Yeah, yes http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc3OTk

Way to quote sandy bridge architecture.