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Maybe for some things. But AMD dropped support for compute (ROCm) for it's RX 580 card after just under 4 years. And there are no open source drivers for comput

Maybe for some things. But AMD dropped support for compute (ROCm) for it's RX 580 card after just under 4 years. And there are no open source drivers for compute.

ColonelPhantom 3y ago
> And there are no open source drivers for compute. Well, technically ROCm is open source (although it comes across more as a "dump source code releases every now and then" to me.) Also, the link is from the Mesa project, which is working on an OpenCL frontend to the driver called rusticl. It's not yet stable or enabled by default, but if you get a build of it, you can try setting the environment variable `RUSTICL_ENABLE=radeonsi` and it should sort-of work (on any Radeon HD 7000 or Radeon R7/R9/RX GPU!) iirc the rusticl developers are even hoping/planning to get HIP (via chipStar) and SYCL (via Intel's compiler) working on top of rusticl.
- atq2119 3y ago
  I mean, the HIP compiler is built on LLVM and AMD-specific development happens directly upstream, which is more than you can say for other vendors. Other parts of the overall ROCm system are in a worse place, admittedly. For some reason, AMD doesn't seem to understand the principles of open development.
slavik81 3y ago
The open-source AMDGPU KFD driver in the Linux kernel supports compute, including with the RX 580 (Polaris). It's true that AMD dropped official support for that hardware and has been closing Polaris-specific bugs as wont-fix. The last ROCm release that AMD validated on Polaris hardware was ROCm 3.5 (June 2020). I've packaged the test suites of the ROCm math libraries for Debian Trixie and have personally donated a selection of Fiji and Polaris hardware for the Debian AI Team's CI. It's beyond my abilities to fix everything wrong on old hardware, but I'm hoping that having publicly accessible test logs will at least help people to understand what works and what doesn't. Of course, it always helps if the community contributes. Debian would certainly be interested in bug reports and patches for Polaris. Users with hardware no longer supported by AMD may find it easier to work with their distro package maintainers than with AMD directly.

Maybe for some things. But AMD dropped support for compute (ROCm) for it's RX 580 card after just under 4 years. And there are no open source drivers for compute.

ColonelPhantom 3y ago

> And there are no open source drivers for compute. Well, technically ROCm is open source (although it comes across more as a "dump source code releases every now and then" to me.) Also, the link is from the Mesa project, which is working on an OpenCL frontend to the driver called rusticl. It's not yet stable or enabled by default, but if you get a build of it, you can try setting the environment variable `RUSTICL_ENABLE=radeonsi` and it should sort-of work (on any Radeon HD 7000 or Radeon R7/R9/RX GPU!) iirc the rusticl developers are even hoping/planning to get HIP (via chipStar) and SYCL (via Intel's compiler) working on top of rusticl.

atq2119 3y ago
I mean, the HIP compiler is built on LLVM and AMD-specific development happens directly upstream, which is more than you can say for other vendors. Other parts of the overall ROCm system are in a worse place, admittedly. For some reason, AMD doesn't seem to understand the principles of open development.

slavik81 3y ago

The open-source AMDGPU KFD driver in the Linux kernel supports compute, including with the RX 580 (Polaris). It's true that AMD dropped official support for that hardware and has been closing Polaris-specific bugs as wont-fix. The last ROCm release that AMD validated on Polaris hardware was ROCm 3.5 (June 2020). I've packaged the test suites of the ROCm math libraries for Debian Trixie and have personally donated a selection of Fiji and Polaris hardware for the Debian AI Team's CI. It's beyond my abilities to fix everything wrong on old hardware, but I'm hoping that having publicly accessible test logs will at least help people to understand what works and what doesn't. Of course, it always helps if the community contributes. Debian would certainly be interested in bug reports and patches for Polaris. Users with hardware no longer supported by AMD may find it easier to work with their distro package maintainers than with AMD directly.