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AMD's GPU drivers are already in the mainline kernel. We shouldn't loose sight of what a victory this is. Imagine any other core component of modern systems re

AMD's GPU drivers are already in the mainline kernel. We shouldn't loose sight of what a victory this is. Imagine any other core component of modern systems requiring such extensive, closed source binary blobs? The APU combos are particularly compelling for desktop Linux.

podiki 6y ago
That's huge and a big reason why my next GPU will be from AMD. If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers, ...it is terrible out there. You can be on a stock watcher Discord and click instantly to still see that it is sold out (and at a huge markup too).
- totalZero 6y ago
  For what it's worth, Lisa Su said that although AMD had underestimated demand, the tightness should ease up by the second half of this year.
  - podiki 6y ago
    I'm sure it'll eventually ease up (there's always a crunch with new GPUs and consoles, plus all the factors of 2020/21), but I don't take AMD's word for much as their early PR on launch availability was hardly good. This was after what we saw happen for Nvidia's launch too. Anyway, there's blame to go around, and these days I'm more inclined to look at how poorly retailers handle it. There are few (or none) backorders or queuing, and sometimes easily gamed systems. Either way they get their money, but it's not a good look. (It is not the end of the world, but annoying and doubly so when so many of us are stuck inside. Certainly much worse problems to have, I know.)
    - ev1 6y ago
      A fairly significant amount of the "easily gamed systems" are actually taking reasonable precautions. Several of the people doing the gaming are escalating it to very stupid heights: dozens of LLCs registered, applied for ASNs, used to hijack large amounts of IP space and hijack Comcast/Verizon/etc IP space to place fraudulent orders. There is a huge amount of CFAA or worse stuff that needs prosecuting - it isn't just bots placing orders, it's mass amounts of hacked machines and hacked phones being used as proxies and cookies stolen for a valid fingerprint/less CAPTCHAs, wire fraud and forgery of documentation being accepted (instead of RPKI/proper filtering) Anyone that has a slightly popular (at all, really) will get shady requests asking to "install a SDK" or "buy your extension" which installs malware on your end-users devices. This is the slightly legal/grey area part. The other part is where AFRINIC recently revoked a /14 for fraud that was nearly entirely used for proxies and abuse by a 1 person US company, based on WHOIS remarks, obtained fraudulently.
      - podiki 6y ago
        Sure, there will always be people out to make a (not so quick?) buck. Having sufficient supply, and thus not being able to scalp for profit, would help. But something as simple as backorders and a queue would help too, as that would tamper demand and need to go to resellers. I think it is utterly absurd that in looking for a new AMD card in the US, there's nowhere I can order and just wait. (One exception I found was Provantage, back from the ol' mail catalog days. I have an order with them but the product has since been removed from the website. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe one day.)
        ev1 6y ago
        The people that do this are using queues - by registering hundreds of thousands of accounts from compromised proxies and signing up for the Newegg raffle on all of them, and queuing up for every possible product on all of them. Some sell sets of cookies that you load into your browser after carting, or they check out for you.
  - dralley 6y ago
    Second half of 2021 is rather unsatisfying, although I understand why. Ultimately if this generation isn't going to be available in quantity until nearly 7 months post-release, I don't see much reason why I shouldn't just skip this generation entirely.
    - radium3d 6y ago
      This may be a good idea. Wouldn't this delayed release of the current generation give the engineers additional time to improve and iterate on the following generation before release?
    - NineStarPoint 6y ago
      I personally see no reason to believe the next generation isn’t going to suffer from similar supply issues. As I understand it there just isn’t extra bandwidth at the manufacturers, it’s less that AMD and Nvidia underestimated demand and more that they couldn’t have gotten more throughout at a reasonable price point. Presumably at some point more factories will start up to close the gap, but (again as I understand it) between COVID slowdown and how difficult modern computer manufacturing is extra throughput could be a few years off.
- nanidin 6y ago
  > If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers My advice, assuming you're on HN with a technical background, is to create your own bot for monitoring product availability on your store of choice. It's a pretty small investment of time, and it frees you up from the time spent watching a Discord or refreshing store pages manually. Set it up to poll at a reasonable frequency, set up some form of push notification, and find that it's not that hard to get ahead of the horde who are all relying on someone else to do the dirty work for them. Signed, Someone who got a launch day 3090 from the Nvidia store
  - reilly3000 6y ago
    What would you consider a reasonable frequency?
    - nanidin 6y ago
      Once per minute when you're close to an expected release of product, once per 3-5 minutes when you don't have a great reason to believe that inventory will be added. My goal is just to mimic me sitting at my laptop refreshing a page trying to buy something as soon as it becomes available, so that I can use my time for something better.
  - jowsie 6y ago
    I'm not dismissing your idea, but the fact you managed to purchase a 3090 on launch day seems more like survivorship bias than anything else.
    - nanidin 6y ago
      You have a good point, because I did fail to get a 3080, but I didn't start automating until after the initial 3080 launch. On the other hand, I did get a 1080ti several months after launch during the crypto-boom of 2017 using the same approach. I have also stumbled upon lots of "we added more tickets to X event" type situations before they are announced on social media and disappear in an instant (think sold out music festivals and concerts).
  - 6y ago
- foobarian 6y ago
  Something I don't get, both in case of Nvidia and PS5 products, is why they don't open the sales with higher prices. They are basically leaving at least 2x the money on the table to scalpers.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Interesting question. I believe nVidia once had a policy of deliberately crippling the double-precision performance of their regular consumer graphics cards, in an effort to push their high-end computation-friendly 'workstation' cards, but that's not quite the same thing. Not a rock-solid source, but: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64.199352/ https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64....
  - 2sk21 6y ago
    Right, why not just conduct auctions?
  - Volundr 6y ago
    Personally I've always wished they'd just do backordering, especially with the PS5. Pre-orders sold out? That's fine just let me get in a queue instead of having to check back constantly and try to race for one. I think that alone would kill the scalper market.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      I don't think it would, people would still be willing to pay more to cut the line.
      - Volundr 6y ago
        Probably some, but I'm not sure it'd be enough to maintain a market. All my friends I game with seem to think they'd prefer just being able to back-order to the current system, and clearly basing market predictions based on myself and my friend group couldn't be wrong :-).
ekianjo 6y ago
Yes - but for proper hardware support you often need to compile the latest Mesa-git. That's not super user friendly yet, but I expect it will get better down the road.
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  Is this true on rolling releases like Manjaro or Arch? If you get the latest Mesa packages regularly, new GPU support seems pretty robust. (Windows 10, where you can expect the latest hardware to work, is closer to a rolling Linux distro in that way. Meanwhile, point-release distros like Ubuntu seem more fit for purpose as server, not end-user, distros.)
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Yes even on Arch, it's recommended to use the AUR to get Mesa-git, especially when a new GPU card comes out.
    - samhh 6y ago
      6800 is already working fine on release mesa for me. Mightn't have been the case if stock wasn't buggered and I'd have gotten my hands on it a couple of months ago at launch, mind.
- donio 6y ago
  I think that only tends to be the case with the newest hardware? Even 3 years ago when I finally made the switched from nvidia to an rx580 things just worked out of the box with stable Mesa and kernel versions.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Yes mostly for new hardware
- Kaze404 6y ago
  I've had the RX 5700 XT since launch and only had to use mesa-git on the first couple of months, which is reasonable imo.
Farfignoggen 6y ago
For game's yes but for Blender 3D's GPU accelerated Cycles rendering(Not CPU Cycles rendering) that relies on OpenCL that's not shipping in the Kernel. So on some of the later HWE Kernels 5.8 for me that's not so good just yet for getting OpenCL working on AMD's Ryzen/Vega integrated graphics(Ryzen 5 3550H) and Radeon RX560X discrete mobile Graphics as well on the same laptop. So Blender 3D currently on my laptop can not detect any OpenCL/Cycles compatible rendering enabled Graphics/GPU and will default to Cycles rendering on the CPU cores instead(Way Slower and ties the CPU cores/threads up 100% until the CPU rendering is finished). So the MESA OpenGL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape but really any OpenCL compute acceleration on AMD's Ryzen APUs and on Kernel 5.8/Later and that's a wait and see. And Blender 3D, Gimp, Dark Table and other open source Graphics applications that need OpenCL will have to wait for that for me. So Compelling for gaming maybe yes but compelling for GPGPU compute workloads that rely on OpenCL not so much compelling on the newer Razen APU based hardware and AMD's Instructions and not as polished as some of the Intel/Linux related instructions. But really most laptop OEMs are still not tuning their laptops firmware for Linux except system76/other linux laptop OEMs! But that ASUS TUF FX505DY laptop was on special sale pre pandemic for $499 so not a bad deal but with loads of special issues to surmount just to get a Linux Mint 20.0 Live USB to even boot to install Mint 20 in a dual boot configuration alongside Windows 10 10/1909 Home. But Blobs and out of tree Wifi drivers and that laptop's getting a Samsung M.2/NVMe to replace the WD Black M.2/NVMe that shipped with the laptop and the Realtek WiFi card sits right under the M.2/NVMe SSD slot so that's getting a more Linux Kernel out of the Box friendly WiFi card with better features as well.
- executesorder66 6y ago
  > most laptop OEMs are still not tuning their laptops firmware for Linux Just curious, what would they actually change in the firmware to "tune a laptop for Linux"?
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    Just checking that ACPI works correctly would already be great. It took my current laptop almost a year of having to disable ACPI completely before fixes&workarounds were implemented in-kernel.
asddubs 6y ago
just recently switched to an AMD card for this reason. well, that, and because I wanted to emulate mac os for safari testing
- depressedpanda 6y ago
  How did it go? You might already be aware of this, but a less annoying way to test Safari compatibility is by using Epiphany (aka 'Web') as a substitute, since it's also based on Webkit. I've solved several Safari bugs that way.
  - asddubs 6y ago
    It went okay, the install was a little messy, I had to restart the VM a couple of times when it hung, but I got it t work in the end, and the actual system itself is pretty stable. I used this project: https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM Thanks for the tip in regards to Epiphany, I am aware, but it doesn't help with testing stuff like ITP unfortunately.
pjmlp 6y ago
I would jump of joy, if I wasn't sour with open source drivers dropping support for the AMD E-350 APU shipped on the 1215B netbook. Closed source blob, OpenGL 4.1 with video hardware acceleration. Open source drivers, OpenGL 3.3 with a kind of working video hardware acceleration. Windows drivers, still OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11. So much for the benefit of open source drivers.
- boudin 6y ago
  Are you sure? According to arch docs, it should be openGL 4.3 or 4.5 when using mesa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Features_Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin... (if I'm not mistaken the GPU architecture is TeraScale 2)
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I am as sure as xglinfo is.
  - Narishma 6y ago
    I too have an Evergreen GPU that supports OpenGL 4.5 in hardware (and on Windows with AMD's proprietary drivers) but only 3.3 on Linux with Mesa.
- atq2119 6y ago
  This kind of thing usually tends to be some sort of configuration error. Rare these days, but not entirely unheard of, and more likely if you build drivers from source.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I don't build drivers from source. If it is a configuration error, Canonical has been making the error since it decided to replace fxgl drivers.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
>Imagine any other core component of modern systems requiring such extensive, closed source binary blobs? Isn't there actually a worrying amount that do? Wifi for instance.

podiki 6y ago

That's huge and a big reason why my next GPU will be from AMD. If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers, ...it is terrible out there. You can be on a stock watcher Discord and click instantly to still see that it is sold out (and at a huge markup too).

totalZero 6y ago
For what it's worth, Lisa Su said that although AMD had underestimated demand, the tightness should ease up by the second half of this year.
- podiki 6y ago
  I'm sure it'll eventually ease up (there's always a crunch with new GPUs and consoles, plus all the factors of 2020/21), but I don't take AMD's word for much as their early PR on launch availability was hardly good. This was after what we saw happen for Nvidia's launch too. Anyway, there's blame to go around, and these days I'm more inclined to look at how poorly retailers handle it. There are few (or none) backorders or queuing, and sometimes easily gamed systems. Either way they get their money, but it's not a good look. (It is not the end of the world, but annoying and doubly so when so many of us are stuck inside. Certainly much worse problems to have, I know.)
  - ev1 6y ago
    A fairly significant amount of the "easily gamed systems" are actually taking reasonable precautions. Several of the people doing the gaming are escalating it to very stupid heights: dozens of LLCs registered, applied for ASNs, used to hijack large amounts of IP space and hijack Comcast/Verizon/etc IP space to place fraudulent orders. There is a huge amount of CFAA or worse stuff that needs prosecuting - it isn't just bots placing orders, it's mass amounts of hacked machines and hacked phones being used as proxies and cookies stolen for a valid fingerprint/less CAPTCHAs, wire fraud and forgery of documentation being accepted (instead of RPKI/proper filtering) Anyone that has a slightly popular (at all, really) will get shady requests asking to "install a SDK" or "buy your extension" which installs malware on your end-users devices. This is the slightly legal/grey area part. The other part is where AFRINIC recently revoked a /14 for fraud that was nearly entirely used for proxies and abuse by a 1 person US company, based on WHOIS remarks, obtained fraudulently.
    - podiki 6y ago
      Sure, there will always be people out to make a (not so quick?) buck. Having sufficient supply, and thus not being able to scalp for profit, would help. But something as simple as backorders and a queue would help too, as that would tamper demand and need to go to resellers. I think it is utterly absurd that in looking for a new AMD card in the US, there's nowhere I can order and just wait. (One exception I found was Provantage, back from the ol' mail catalog days. I have an order with them but the product has since been removed from the website. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe one day.)
      - ev1 6y ago
        The people that do this are using queues - by registering hundreds of thousands of accounts from compromised proxies and signing up for the Newegg raffle on all of them, and queuing up for every possible product on all of them. Some sell sets of cookies that you load into your browser after carting, or they check out for you.
- dralley 6y ago
  Second half of 2021 is rather unsatisfying, although I understand why. Ultimately if this generation isn't going to be available in quantity until nearly 7 months post-release, I don't see much reason why I shouldn't just skip this generation entirely.
  - radium3d 6y ago
    This may be a good idea. Wouldn't this delayed release of the current generation give the engineers additional time to improve and iterate on the following generation before release?
  - NineStarPoint 6y ago
    I personally see no reason to believe the next generation isn’t going to suffer from similar supply issues. As I understand it there just isn’t extra bandwidth at the manufacturers, it’s less that AMD and Nvidia underestimated demand and more that they couldn’t have gotten more throughout at a reasonable price point. Presumably at some point more factories will start up to close the gap, but (again as I understand it) between COVID slowdown and how difficult modern computer manufacturing is extra throughput could be a few years off.
nanidin 6y ago
> If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers My advice, assuming you're on HN with a technical background, is to create your own bot for monitoring product availability on your store of choice. It's a pretty small investment of time, and it frees you up from the time spent watching a Discord or refreshing store pages manually. Set it up to poll at a reasonable frequency, set up some form of push notification, and find that it's not that hard to get ahead of the horde who are all relying on someone else to do the dirty work for them. Signed, Someone who got a launch day 3090 from the Nvidia store
- reilly3000 6y ago
  What would you consider a reasonable frequency?
  - nanidin 6y ago
    Once per minute when you're close to an expected release of product, once per 3-5 minutes when you don't have a great reason to believe that inventory will be added. My goal is just to mimic me sitting at my laptop refreshing a page trying to buy something as soon as it becomes available, so that I can use my time for something better.
- jowsie 6y ago
  I'm not dismissing your idea, but the fact you managed to purchase a 3090 on launch day seems more like survivorship bias than anything else.
  - nanidin 6y ago
    You have a good point, because I did fail to get a 3080, but I didn't start automating until after the initial 3080 launch. On the other hand, I did get a 1080ti several months after launch during the crypto-boom of 2017 using the same approach. I have also stumbled upon lots of "we added more tickets to X event" type situations before they are announced on social media and disappear in an instant (think sold out music festivals and concerts).
- 6y ago
foobarian 6y ago
Something I don't get, both in case of Nvidia and PS5 products, is why they don't open the sales with higher prices. They are basically leaving at least 2x the money on the table to scalpers.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Interesting question. I believe nVidia once had a policy of deliberately crippling the double-precision performance of their regular consumer graphics cards, in an effort to push their high-end computation-friendly 'workstation' cards, but that's not quite the same thing. Not a rock-solid source, but: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64.199352/ https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64....
- 2sk21 6y ago
  Right, why not just conduct auctions?
- Volundr 6y ago
  Personally I've always wished they'd just do backordering, especially with the PS5. Pre-orders sold out? That's fine just let me get in a queue instead of having to check back constantly and try to race for one. I think that alone would kill the scalper market.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    I don't think it would, people would still be willing to pay more to cut the line.
    - Volundr 6y ago
      Probably some, but I'm not sure it'd be enough to maintain a market. All my friends I game with seem to think they'd prefer just being able to back-order to the current system, and clearly basing market predictions based on myself and my friend group couldn't be wrong :-).

ekianjo 6y ago

Yes - but for proper hardware support you often need to compile the latest Mesa-git. That's not super user friendly yet, but I expect it will get better down the road.

shrimp_emoji 6y ago
Is this true on rolling releases like Manjaro or Arch? If you get the latest Mesa packages regularly, new GPU support seems pretty robust. (Windows 10, where you can expect the latest hardware to work, is closer to a rolling Linux distro in that way. Meanwhile, point-release distros like Ubuntu seem more fit for purpose as server, not end-user, distros.)
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Yes even on Arch, it's recommended to use the AUR to get Mesa-git, especially when a new GPU card comes out.
  - samhh 6y ago
    6800 is already working fine on release mesa for me. Mightn't have been the case if stock wasn't buggered and I'd have gotten my hands on it a couple of months ago at launch, mind.
donio 6y ago
I think that only tends to be the case with the newest hardware? Even 3 years ago when I finally made the switched from nvidia to an rx580 things just worked out of the box with stable Mesa and kernel versions.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Yes mostly for new hardware
Kaze404 6y ago
I've had the RX 5700 XT since launch and only had to use mesa-git on the first couple of months, which is reasonable imo.

Farfignoggen 6y ago

For game's yes but for Blender 3D's GPU accelerated Cycles rendering(Not CPU Cycles rendering) that relies on OpenCL that's not shipping in the Kernel. So on some of the later HWE Kernels 5.8 for me that's not so good just yet for getting OpenCL working on AMD's Ryzen/Vega integrated graphics(Ryzen 5 3550H) and Radeon RX560X discrete mobile Graphics as well on the same laptop. So Blender 3D currently on my laptop can not detect any OpenCL/Cycles compatible rendering enabled Graphics/GPU and will default to Cycles rendering on the CPU cores instead(Way Slower and ties the CPU cores/threads up 100% until the CPU rendering is finished). So the MESA OpenGL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape but really any OpenCL compute acceleration on AMD's Ryzen APUs and on Kernel 5.8/Later and that's a wait and see. And Blender 3D, Gimp, Dark Table and other open source Graphics applications that need OpenCL will have to wait for that for me. So Compelling for gaming maybe yes but compelling for GPGPU compute workloads that rely on OpenCL not so much compelling on the newer Razen APU based hardware and AMD's Instructions and not as polished as some of the Intel/Linux related instructions. But really most laptop OEMs are still not tuning their laptops firmware for Linux except system76/other linux laptop OEMs! But that ASUS TUF FX505DY laptop was on special sale pre pandemic for $499 so not a bad deal but with loads of special issues to surmount just to get a Linux Mint 20.0 Live USB to even boot to install Mint 20 in a dual boot configuration alongside Windows 10 10/1909 Home. But Blobs and out of tree Wifi drivers and that laptop's getting a Samsung M.2/NVMe to replace the WD Black M.2/NVMe that shipped with the laptop and the Realtek WiFi card sits right under the M.2/NVMe SSD slot so that's getting a more Linux Kernel out of the Box friendly WiFi card with better features as well.

executesorder66 6y ago
> most laptop OEMs are still not tuning their laptops firmware for Linux Just curious, what would they actually change in the firmware to "tune a laptop for Linux"?
- jcelerier 6y ago
  Just checking that ACPI works correctly would already be great. It took my current laptop almost a year of having to disable ACPI completely before fixes&workarounds were implemented in-kernel.

asddubs 6y ago

just recently switched to an AMD card for this reason. well, that, and because I wanted to emulate mac os for safari testing

depressedpanda 6y ago
How did it go? You might already be aware of this, but a less annoying way to test Safari compatibility is by using Epiphany (aka 'Web') as a substitute, since it's also based on Webkit. I've solved several Safari bugs that way.
- asddubs 6y ago
  It went okay, the install was a little messy, I had to restart the VM a couple of times when it hung, but I got it t work in the end, and the actual system itself is pretty stable. I used this project: https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM Thanks for the tip in regards to Epiphany, I am aware, but it doesn't help with testing stuff like ITP unfortunately.

pjmlp 6y ago

I would jump of joy, if I wasn't sour with open source drivers dropping support for the AMD E-350 APU shipped on the 1215B netbook. Closed source blob, OpenGL 4.1 with video hardware acceleration. Open source drivers, OpenGL 3.3 with a kind of working video hardware acceleration. Windows drivers, still OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11. So much for the benefit of open source drivers.

boudin 6y ago
Are you sure? According to arch docs, it should be openGL 4.3 or 4.5 when using mesa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Features_Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin... (if I'm not mistaken the GPU architecture is TeraScale 2)
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I am as sure as xglinfo is.
- Narishma 6y ago
  I too have an Evergreen GPU that supports OpenGL 4.5 in hardware (and on Windows with AMD's proprietary drivers) but only 3.3 on Linux with Mesa.
atq2119 6y ago
This kind of thing usually tends to be some sort of configuration error. Rare these days, but not entirely unheard of, and more likely if you build drivers from source.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I don't build drivers from source. If it is a configuration error, Canonical has been making the error since it decided to replace fxgl drivers.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

>Imagine any other core component of modern systems requiring such extensive, closed source binary blobs? Isn't there actually a worrying amount that do? Wifi for instance.