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How does this relate to the goals outlined by George Hotz to bring ML to AMD chips and break the Nvidia dominance? I'm not an expert here but this approach see

How does this relate to the goals outlined by George Hotz to bring ML to AMD chips and break the Nvidia dominance? I'm not an expert here but this approach seems powerful and important. But this system seems complex enough to doubt the ability of an individual to build. It seems like this would need a corporate sponsor to get off the ground. Perhaps AMD itself would be interested in paying engineers to iterate on this?

jitl 3y ago
Holtz is talking about drivers too, not just user space libraries. > The software is terrible! There’s kernel panics in the driver. You have to run a newer kernel than the Ubuntu default to make it remotely stable. I’m still not sure if the driver supports putting two cards in one machine, or if there’s some poorly written global state. When I put the second card in and run an OpenCL program, half the time it kernel panics and you have to reboot. He also talks about user space stuff but clearly he thinks the whole stack, above and below this kind of library also needs a lot of work.
- cwillu 3y ago
  Par for the course with new kernel things: it's unusual for something new in the kernel to be stable in the distro kernels unless they've devoted a great deal of effort to backport things.
  - arthur2e5 3y ago
    The way conservative distros define "stable" is part of the problem. For things less than 3 years old, going for stale versions often runs counter to "stable".
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that works than a broken piece of garbage. We tried to get an MI50 to work reliably at work with KVM, but that thing was a complete dumpster fire. A colleague just bought a 7900XTX for gaming and spent days getting it to work. This included three Windows reinstalls. And that use case is gaming on Windows, which supposedly is the best supported case. It only gets worse from there. Compute on Linux? Lol. Now last time this topic came up, someone claimed that AMD is pretty much at their limits production wise, and there are a few unnamed large companies buying loads of their cards for compute and cloud gaming, and AMD basically has engineers dedicated to making sure things work exactly for their use case, so they don't have to really care about the rest. Sounds pretty wild, but not completely unrealistic...
  - hedora 3y ago
    I've had the opposite experience under Linux. My old nvidia 570's drivers went into severe bitrot. Basic stuff like screensavers and desktops broke badly, and games were flaky. The card is still more than powerful enough for what I used it for. I switched to AMD, with open source drivers. I get windows-level performance on AAA (and indie) games in steam, and zero compatibility issues with the rest of the Linux ecosystem.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
      Yeah, I’ve always bought AMD for this reason since some really bad experiences with Nvidia cards.
    - amlib 3y ago
      AMD GPU support in linux is a bit of a flip flop. Some generations seem to get a lot of love and work really damn well (sometimes with better and broader support than the windows drivers) like RDNA2 and most Polaris cards. Others such as Vega and specially now RDNA3 are a shitshow with a lot of things just broken.
      - tyfon 3y ago
        I ran vega 64 in linux for 3-4 years, it was really nice. It also worked without bugs with proton, the 3060 I have now gives me a lot of artifacts like incorrect lightning and even X crashes once in a while. I'm considering switching back to an AMD card due to this.
      - gcoakes 3y ago
        I used a Vega64 for years and just bought a 6000 series. Both work great on my machines. I'm typically running the bleeding edge kernels though, so that might explain it a bit. I would think Ubuntu is probably the most supported if you opt for the OEM kernel.
    - aseipp 3y ago
      It really depends on the card. I have an old RDNA workstation card in my server and the driver was a real crapshoot. I eventually started delaying updates to newer kernel releases (which would fix other bugs!) because there would be regressions of various kinds. Graphics under Linux is still a bit painful after all these years. At least Nvidia finally open sourced their driver too, I guess. And Intel is still open source. But it still sucks a bit I think unless you do research.
- varelse 3y ago
  [dead]
- imtringued 3y ago
  The only hope is rusticl and it happens inspite of AMD.
roenxi 3y ago
Hmm. I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU and https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-dive-into-amds-drivers.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-div... I feel a lot better about my journey with AMD now; there seemed to be some major issues with their GPU drivers. Now I know it wasn't just me.

jitl 3y ago

Holtz is talking about drivers too, not just user space libraries. > The software is terrible! There’s kernel panics in the driver. You have to run a newer kernel than the Ubuntu default to make it remotely stable. I’m still not sure if the driver supports putting two cards in one machine, or if there’s some poorly written global state. When I put the second card in and run an OpenCL program, half the time it kernel panics and you have to reboot. He also talks about user space stuff but clearly he thinks the whole stack, above and below this kind of library also needs a lot of work.

cwillu 3y ago
Par for the course with new kernel things: it's unusual for something new in the kernel to be stable in the distro kernels unless they've devoted a great deal of effort to backport things.
- arthur2e5 3y ago
  The way conservative distros define "stable" is part of the problem. For things less than 3 years old, going for stale versions often runs counter to "stable".
iforgotpassword 3y ago
This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that works than a broken piece of garbage. We tried to get an MI50 to work reliably at work with KVM, but that thing was a complete dumpster fire. A colleague just bought a 7900XTX for gaming and spent days getting it to work. This included three Windows reinstalls. And that use case is gaming on Windows, which supposedly is the best supported case. It only gets worse from there. Compute on Linux? Lol. Now last time this topic came up, someone claimed that AMD is pretty much at their limits production wise, and there are a few unnamed large companies buying loads of their cards for compute and cloud gaming, and AMD basically has engineers dedicated to making sure things work exactly for their use case, so they don't have to really care about the rest. Sounds pretty wild, but not completely unrealistic...
- hedora 3y ago
  I've had the opposite experience under Linux. My old nvidia 570's drivers went into severe bitrot. Basic stuff like screensavers and desktops broke badly, and games were flaky. The card is still more than powerful enough for what I used it for. I switched to AMD, with open source drivers. I get windows-level performance on AAA (and indie) games in steam, and zero compatibility issues with the rest of the Linux ecosystem.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
    Yeah, I’ve always bought AMD for this reason since some really bad experiences with Nvidia cards.
  - amlib 3y ago
    AMD GPU support in linux is a bit of a flip flop. Some generations seem to get a lot of love and work really damn well (sometimes with better and broader support than the windows drivers) like RDNA2 and most Polaris cards. Others such as Vega and specially now RDNA3 are a shitshow with a lot of things just broken.
    - tyfon 3y ago
      I ran vega 64 in linux for 3-4 years, it was really nice. It also worked without bugs with proton, the 3060 I have now gives me a lot of artifacts like incorrect lightning and even X crashes once in a while. I'm considering switching back to an AMD card due to this.
    - gcoakes 3y ago
      I used a Vega64 for years and just bought a 6000 series. Both work great on my machines. I'm typically running the bleeding edge kernels though, so that might explain it a bit. I would think Ubuntu is probably the most supported if you opt for the OEM kernel.
  - aseipp 3y ago
    It really depends on the card. I have an old RDNA workstation card in my server and the driver was a real crapshoot. I eventually started delaying updates to newer kernel releases (which would fix other bugs!) because there would be regressions of various kinds. Graphics under Linux is still a bit painful after all these years. At least Nvidia finally open sourced their driver too, I guess. And Intel is still open source. But it still sucks a bit I think unless you do research.
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
imtringued 3y ago
The only hope is rusticl and it happens inspite of AMD.

roenxi 3y ago

Hmm. I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU and https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-dive-into-amds-drivers.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-div... I feel a lot better about my journey with AMD now; there seemed to be some major issues with their GPU drivers. Now I know it wasn't just me.