AMD Building New GPU Linux Kernel Driver To Unify With Catalyst Driver 56
An anonymous reader writes: AMD is moving forward with their plans to develop a new open-source Linux driver model for their Radeon and FirePro graphics processors. Their unified Linux driver model is moving forward, albeit slightly different compared to what was planned early this year. They're now developing a new "AMDGPU" kernel driver to power both the open and closed-source graphics components. This new driver model will also only apply to future generations of AMD GPUs. Catalyst is not being open-sourced, but will be a self-contained user-space blob, and the DRM/libdrm/DDX components will be open-source and shared. This new model is more open-source friendly, places greater emphasis on their mainline kernel driver, and should help Catalyst support Mir and Wayland.
Re:Still not actually open (Score:5, Insightful)
That is part of it, to be sure...
The other part is that many trade secrets lay within those binary blobs...
It isn't just you they don't want seeing all that, nVidia is on their radar as well...
Plus, keep in mind that some of their technology isn't theirs, cross licensing and patents protect many things in video graphics, some of it isn't theirs to release...
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It is at least a step in the right direction.
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I suspect that their real concern is making older cards backward compatible with new features. Do you really think last years video card can't support the newest version of DirectX? Remember the Intel chips that you could upgrade by simply soldering 2 pins together? I suspect that THAT is what they are really afraid of. The mod community figuring out how to make upgrading less important.
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New DX versions often require new hardware, and you can't just stick a few wires on the board to add new instructions to the graphics units.
Besides which, Microsoft seem to have decided that they're going to force you to buy a new OS to support new DX versions in future, so who cares?
Re:Still not actually open (Score:5, Insightful)
"New DX versions often require new hardware"
And this is why OpenGL is superior, and always has been.
At roughly 33% less power/cycle cost vs DX which requires being sent through the CPU two or three times instead of going directly to the GPU.
Plus, OpenGL can have anything added in - you're stuck with DX features.
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At roughly 33% less power/cycle cost vs DX which requires being sent through the CPU two or three times instead of going directly to the GPU.
Citation required.
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> Do you really think last years video card can't support the newest
> version of DirectX?
I'm pretty sure that DirectX support is not that important for a Linux driver.
> Remember the Intel chips that you could upgrade by simply soldering
> 2 pins together? I suspect that THAT is what they are really afraid of.
And the tens, nay hundreds of lost sales that incurred?
> The mod community figuring out how to make upgrading less important.
Since most or many AMD graphics these days ship as part of an A
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Yes, all details about tilt-bits are kept secret in case those filthy pirates try to copy a movie directly from the graphics card's memory.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/... [schneier.com]
They didn't die with Vista and this is why you'll NEVER get fully open drivers.
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"The other part is that many trade secrets lay within those binary blobs.."
Gimme a break. By now other companies have come up with the same algorithms and processes for optimal execution of specific commands on given silicon. The shit shouldn't be patentable or trade secret in the first place as it's all math.
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If that was true, then driver updates wouldn't speed up games and clean up bugs.
The turnover is so quick and new technology keeps coming out (think Eyefinity and Surround), that both companies are racing to keep up.
If you think the secret sauce is so simple, go checkout Eyefinity and Surround. Both work, but they do it in different ways and are compatible with games differently.
I've used both, they each have their upsides and downsides, but they do not work the same.
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The hardware has nothing to do with anything here...
This is about software, not hardware...
Physically having access to the hardware, inspecting the chip itself, that isn't new, it has been done for a long time...
What the software does with that hardware however, is a trade secret...
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When are they going to start figuring out how to license those things in a way that is compatible with open source?
What benefit does AMD or nVidia get from doing that?
Considering the desktop market of Linux is about 1%, give or take... Frankly I think you should be happy they do ANYTHING at all...
Poke at them enough and they might decide to not bother.
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Also worth nothing is that if they couldn't sell faster, fully enabled hardware for higher prices, then they'd have to sell all their hardware for higher prices.
AMD isn't making billions like Intel is, they need the more expensive hardware to try and earn a profit. The low end is volume, not profit. :)
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AMD publishes all their low-level hardware details, but they maintain their own drivers. Catalyst is proprietary primarily for two reasons:
1. Third-party technology is present within the driver, and AMD has no right to Free that code up.
2. Drivers do crazy stupid tricks to maximize FPS figures, which AMD would prefer that NVidia not know.
This is the same for NVidia's blob as well, though, except that NVidia doesn't publish documentation. (Mostly out of laziness as they don't separate trade secrets from regi
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Not necessarily.
You falsely assume that drivers can necessarily be used to 'unlock' cards. It's possible that drivers can indeed do this for AMD's cards, but you'll have to provide evidence that that's the case; it's not self-evident.
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"you'll have to provide evidence that that's the case; it's not self-evident."
Another ignorant idiot that has never heard of Omega Drivers.
Been around for a decade plus, still unheard of.
Wake up. We're still implementing shit DX13 will not even have.
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Another ignorant idiot that has never heard of Omega Drivers.
No need to be an asshole. Also, you're wrong on all three counts.
Do modern AMD cards still have soft-disabled capabilities? Years back I played about with drivers to unlock pixel/vertex pipelines on cards, but I read nVidia took to physically disabling their disabled pipelines. I assumed - perhaps wrongly - that unlocking in drivers was a thing of the past.
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"Do modern AMD cards still have soft-disabled capabilities?"
Yup. Today we just toss a firmware blob in there to unlock it and then fix the card report string.
OTOH, that's also how cards get counterfeited, as well.
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These hardware companies will never truly make their systems open, equally able to be used by any OS written by anyone under any license. The reason? They want to be able to sell the same hardware in different "models" at different prices, with the difference enforced by binary blobs.
I'm not holding my breath for a blobless future; but architecturally that's a somewhat antique way of enforcing a restriction: a TPM, or TPM-like crypto chip costs maybe 2-3 dollars as a discrete chip in modest volumes, likely less in considerable quantity or if the necessary functions are baked into some other chip to save on packaging and board space. If you have one of those, you don't need some big binary blob driver, or even an OSS driver talking to a binary blob in userspace in order to cripple (did I
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Not as long as you can disable it or set your own signatures, what TPM gives you is a chain of trust but unless your entire system enforces it where the TPM will only load a signed BIOS, the BIOS will only load a signed OS, the OS will only load signed drivers and you don't need it for remote attestation or some other proof you're running a DRM-compliant system you can just turn it off and run the hardware with any hacked up driver you want. And making a graphics card that will only work with particular unm
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systemd support? (Score:3, Funny)
Call me when RedHat ships systemd-catalystdriver, until then I'm not touching this old, crufty technology that's clearly not ready for the Cloud.
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Call me when RedHat ships systemd-catalystdriver, until then I'm not touching this old, crufty technology that's clearly not ready for the Cloud.
Good one.
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Interesting legally (Score:3)
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AMD GPU arch is Open....
Cool (Score:1)
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Or they'll just be on Catalyst-legacy for quite a while...
It's also not the first time that AMD has done something like this - remember when they dropped everything older then the HD 5000 series?
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The "future" GPUs support protected mode and preemptive context switching, first of their kind. You will actually be able to pass a virtual memory address to the GPU, and it will respect that virtual memory space just like the CPU, and can even issue page faults to have the kernel load from the page file. Their new GPUs will fully integrate into the virtual memory system. I'm sure this has a lot to do with their lack of backwards compatibility.
Can I fucking get HDCP off this thing yet? (Score:2)
Seriously. I'd just like to see the ouput of my cablecard network device...
Closed or open... (Score:2)
Do AMD linux graphic drivers actually work now? Last time I checked on winehq, there were a lot more people complaining about graphics problems on cards than on Nvidia cards...
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We are using Catalyst drivers to run 4K monitors in our operations center under Xubuntu. They are working great for the operator workstations! I had to get the latest drivers from the AMD site in order to get both the resolution and HDMI sound working but work it does. Love these big 50 inch monitors. No we don't play games we're just keeping the lights on. (Electric utility) We are also running CentOS with Nvidia cards to operate our video wall. Each has 4 Nvidia cards with 4, 4K outputs each to driv