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Historically Intel has the best Linux open-source drivers, with OpenCL and OpenGL support (unlike AMD ROCM which requires a custom kernel and closed-source comp

by _fjb4 4y ago

Historically Intel has the best Linux open-source drivers, with OpenCL and OpenGL support (unlike AMD ROCM which requires a custom kernel and closed-source components, and the fully closed Nvidia stack). Unfortunately for ARC they pretty much marketed it solely for gaming applications, where the chip and drivers don't really excel in. Linux support, AV1 encoding, and so on are its strong points, not raw performance. You can argue that those things don't make as much money as the gaming market, but if Intel's beaten by the competition on the performance side they'll need to find another route to sell this.

halotrope 4y ago
Raw performance is not there yet but the "Max" gpus seem to be quite powerful and on par with Nvidia (on paper). Blender and also gaming (via Proton) works quite well under Linux too already which is great considering the drivers are not even fully merged into mainline yet.
iod 4y ago
Not sure what you are talking about as far as AMD? This statement in particular: > "unlike AMD ROCM which requires a custom kernel and closed-source components" As far as my experience, ROCm does not require a custom kernel nor special kernel modules as it works just fine for me with stock distro kernels, nor does it require closed-source components. OpenCL and OpenGL have pretty much always worked fine for a long time now. I think that AMD drivers are just as good as Intel ones especially when it comes to how open-source they are. While it's cool that Intel already has AV1 encoding on their new cards, I fully expect AMD will have just as good AV1 encoding on their next gen RDNA 3 cards too when they come out soon.
- digitallyfree 4y ago
  Did some research into this and it looks like ROCM is much easier to set up now as you mention. I remember in the past it required a lot of changes to the stock system to get working, but I haven't touched ROCM in a long time.
- vetinari 4y ago
  In Fedora, the 37 release (released about two weeks ago) is the first time ever I got OpenCL working on Vega, via rocm-opencl. Until 37, rocm was not packaged at all, and the upstream packages support only Ubuntu and CentOS. Even with 37, rocm is not complete. HIP is missing, blender doesn't work and asks for the proprietary driver (which, again, works only with Ubuntu and CentOS).
  - iod 4y ago
    I think you have gotten to the crux of it, distro package maintainers seem to have not done a particularly good job in many distros when it comes to AMD, but that is hardly AMD's fault as they have done a fairly good job at running their own full binaries repo¹ for various package formats. I also would recommend therefore that you change to AMD's repo as it definitely contains the HIP runtime. It would appear that you just need to add https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/yum/rpm https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/yum/rpm to your package manager for Fedora. For ROCm OpenCL, my only pointer is that you have to make sure that you are adding the dynamic library path, for example: $ env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/rocm-5.4.0/opencl/lib clinfo I am pretty sure that you should be able to resolve both OpenCL and Blender+HIP support given your configuration details given so far and I hope you figure it out. ¹ https://repo.radeon.com/rocm https://repo.radeon.com/rocm
matheusmoreira 4y ago
I wonder if Intel will keep providing good Linux support in the future. I read a comment on LWN saying the person responsible for that has left Intel.

by _fjb4 4y ago

halotrope 4y ago

Raw performance is not there yet but the "Max" gpus seem to be quite powerful and on par with Nvidia (on paper). Blender and also gaming (via Proton) works quite well under Linux too already which is great considering the drivers are not even fully merged into mainline yet.

iod 4y ago

Not sure what you are talking about as far as AMD? This statement in particular: > "unlike AMD ROCM which requires a custom kernel and closed-source components" As far as my experience, ROCm does not require a custom kernel nor special kernel modules as it works just fine for me with stock distro kernels, nor does it require closed-source components. OpenCL and OpenGL have pretty much always worked fine for a long time now. I think that AMD drivers are just as good as Intel ones especially when it comes to how open-source they are. While it's cool that Intel already has AV1 encoding on their new cards, I fully expect AMD will have just as good AV1 encoding on their next gen RDNA 3 cards too when they come out soon.

digitallyfree 4y ago
Did some research into this and it looks like ROCM is much easier to set up now as you mention. I remember in the past it required a lot of changes to the stock system to get working, but I haven't touched ROCM in a long time.
vetinari 4y ago
In Fedora, the 37 release (released about two weeks ago) is the first time ever I got OpenCL working on Vega, via rocm-opencl. Until 37, rocm was not packaged at all, and the upstream packages support only Ubuntu and CentOS. Even with 37, rocm is not complete. HIP is missing, blender doesn't work and asks for the proprietary driver (which, again, works only with Ubuntu and CentOS).
- iod 4y ago
  I think you have gotten to the crux of it, distro package maintainers seem to have not done a particularly good job in many distros when it comes to AMD, but that is hardly AMD's fault as they have done a fairly good job at running their own full binaries repo¹ for various package formats. I also would recommend therefore that you change to AMD's repo as it definitely contains the HIP runtime. It would appear that you just need to add https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/yum/rpm https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/yum/rpm to your package manager for Fedora. For ROCm OpenCL, my only pointer is that you have to make sure that you are adding the dynamic library path, for example: $ env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/rocm-5.4.0/opencl/lib clinfo I am pretty sure that you should be able to resolve both OpenCL and Blender+HIP support given your configuration details given so far and I hope you figure it out. ¹ https://repo.radeon.com/rocm https://repo.radeon.com/rocm

matheusmoreira 4y ago

I wonder if Intel will keep providing good Linux support in the future. I read a comment on LWN saying the person responsible for that has left Intel.