8 ms·

AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan project is discontinued

154 points by haunter 1y ago

shmerl 1y ago
What will AMD do with Windows Vulkan driver, didn't they use amdvlk there? There was some radv on Windows experiment, it would be cool if AMD would use that.
- trynumber9 1y ago
  No, it was a third driver. Per AMD >Notably, AMD's closed-source Vulkan driver currently uses a different pipeline compiler, which is the major difference between AMD's open-source and closed-source Vulkan drivers.
  - shmerl 1y ago
    Why are they using different compilers?
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      Bluntly: because they don't get software and never did. The hardware is actually pretty good but the software has always been terrible and it is a serious problem because NV sure could use some real competition.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        I wish hardware vendors would just stop trying to write software. The vast majority of them are terrible at it and even within the tiny minority that can ship something that doesn't non-deterministically implode during normal operation, the vast majority of those are a hostile lock-in play. Hardware vendors: Stop writing software. Instead write and publish hardware documentation sufficient for others to write the code. If you want to publish a reference implementation that's fine, but your assumption should be that its primary purpose is as a form of documentation for the people who are going to make a better one. Focus on making good hardware with good documentation. Intel had great success for many years by doing that well and have recently stumbled not because the strategy doesn't work but because they stopped fulfilling the "make good hardware" part of it relative to TSMC.
        mschuster91 1y ago
        The problem is, making hardware is hard. Screw something up, in the best case you can fix it in ucode, if you're not that lucky you can get away with a new stepping, but in the worst case you have to do a recall and not just deal with your own wasted effort, but also the wasted downstream efforts and rework costs. So a lot of the complexity of what the hardware is doing gets relegated to firmware as that is easier to patch and, especially relevant for wifi hardware before the specs get finalized, extend/adapt later on. The problem with that, in turn, is patents and trade secrets. What used to be hideable in the ASIC masks now is computer code that's more or less trivially disassemblable or to reverse engineer (see e.g. nouveau for older NVDA cards and Alyssa's work on Apple), and if you want true FOSS support, you sometimes can't fulfill other requirements at the same time (see the drama surrounding HDMI2/HDCP support for AMD on Linux). And for anything RF you get the FCC that's going to throw rocks around on top of that. Since a few years, the unique combination of RF devices (wifi, bt, 4G/5G), antenna and OS side driver has to be certified. That's why you get Lenovo devices refusing to boot when you have a non-Lenovo USB network adapter attached at boot time or when you swap the Sierra Wireless modem with an identical modem from a Dell (that only has a different VID/PID), or why you need old, long outdated Lenovo/Dell/HP/... drivers for RF devices and the "official" manufacturer ones will not work without patching. I would love a world in which everyone in the ecosystem were forced to provide interface documentation, datasheets, errata and ucode/firmware blobs with source for all their devices, but unfortunately, DRM, anti-cheat, anti-fraud and overeager RF regulatory authorities have a lot of influence over lawmakers, way more than FOSS advocates.
        yencabulator 1y ago
        Linux already maintains quirks code paths for all kinds of devices where the manufacturer "could have" updated the firmware to fix the bug but never did. It also contains quirks for Intel x86 core platform features: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/kernel/quirks.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/kerne... For the now-fashionable LLMs-on-GPUs world, it's pretty much just matrix multiplications. How many patents can reside in that? I don't expect Google to sell TPUs because that's not the business they're in, but AMD could put them in their SoCs without writing drivers: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system-architecture-tpu-vm#chips https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system-architecture-tpu-vm...
    - account42 1y ago
      Either licensing issues (maybe they don't own all parts of the closed source shader compiler) or fears that Nvidia/Intel could find out things about the hardware that AMD wants to keep secret (the fears being Unfounded doesn't make the possibility of them being a reason any less likely). Or alternatively they considered it not worth releasing it (legal review isn't free) because the LLVM back-end was supposed to replace it anyway.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > or fears that Nvidia/Intel could find out things about the hardware that AMD wants to keep secret (the fears being Unfounded doesn't make the possibility of them being a reason any less likely) When the fears are unfounded the reason isn't "Nvidia/Intel could find out things about the hardware", it's "incompetence rooted in believing something that isn't true". Which is an entirely different thing because in one case they would have a proper dilemma and in the other they would need only extricate their cranium from their rectum.
        mschuster91 1y ago
        > When the fears are unfounded the reason isn't "Nvidia/Intel could find out things about the hardware" Good luck trying to explain that to Legal. The problem at the core with everything FOSS is the patent and patent licensing minefield. Hardware patents are already risky enough to get torched by some "submarine patent" troll, the US adds software patents to that mix. And even if you think you got all the licenses you need, it might be the case that the licensing terms ban you from developing FOSS drivers/software implementing the patent, or that you got a situation like the HDMI2/HDCP situation where the DRM <insert derogatory term here> insist on keeping their shit secret, or you got regulatory requirements on RF emissions. And unless you got backing from someone very high up the chain, Corporate Legal will default to denying your request for FOSS work if there is even a slight chance it might pose a legal risk for the company.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > Hardware patents are already risky enough to get torched by some "submarine patent" troll, the US adds software patents to that mix. Software patents are indeed a scourge, but not publishing source code doesn't get you out of it. Patent trolls file overly broad patents or submarine patents on things they get included into standards so that everyone is infringing their patent because the patent covers the abstract shape of every solution to that problem rather than any specific one, or covers the specific one required by the standard. They can still prove that using binary software because your device is still observably doing the thing covered by the patent. Meanwhile arguing that this makes it harder for them to figure out that you're infringing their patent actually cuts the other way, because if plaintiffs are clever they're going to use that exact reasoning to argue for willful infringement -- that concealing the source code is evidence that you know you're infringing and trying to hide it. > And even if you think you got all the licenses you need, it might be the case that the licensing terms ban you from developing FOSS drivers/software implementing the patent, or that you got a situation like the HDMI2/HDCP situation where the DRM <insert derogatory term here> insist on keeping their shit secret, or you got regulatory requirements on RF emissions. To my knowledge there is no actual requirement that you not publish the source code for radio devices, only some language about not giving the user the option to exceed regulatory limits. But if that can be done through software then it could also be done by patching the binary or using a binary meant for another region, so it's not clear how publishing the code would change that one way or the other. More relevantly, it's pretty uncommon for a GPU to have a radio transceiver in it anyway, isn't it? On top of that, this would only be relevant to begin with for firmware and not drivers. And the recommended way of implementing DRM is to not, but supposing that you're going to do it anyway, that would only apply to the DRM code and not all the rest of it. A GPU is basically a separate processor running its own OS which is separated into various libraries and programs. The DRM code is code that shouldn't even be running unless you're currently decoding DRM'd media and could be its own optional tiny little blob even if the other 98% of the code is published.
  - kimixa 1y ago
    The windows driver has 2 paths, the internal compiler, and the same LLVM as in the open source amdvlk release (though there might be things like not-yet-upstreamed changes, experimental new hardware support etc. that differ from the public version, it was fundamentally the same codebase). The same for DX12 (and any other driver that might use their PAL layer). If you want to confirm you can see all the llvm symbols in the driver's amdvlk{32,64}.dll and amdxc{32,64}.dll files. From what I remember, the internal compiler path is just stripped out for the open source amdvlk releases. I believe the intent was to slowly deprecate the internal closed compiler, and leave it more as a fallback for older hardware, with most new development happening on LLVM. Though my info is a few months out of date now, I'd be surprised if the trajectory changed that quickly.
    - account42 1y ago
      AFAIK the closed source shader compiler was/is also available for Linux in the amdgpu-pro package, just not in the open source releases.
CBLT 1y ago
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDVLK-Discontinued https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDVLK-Discontinued > This is a good but long overdue decision by AMD. RADV has long been more popular with gamers/enthusiasts on Linux than their own official driver. Thanks to Valve, Google, Red Hat, and others, RADV has evolved very nicely.
potwinkle 1y ago
This is great news for RADV development, I'm hoping someday we can even use ROCm on the open source stack.
- account42 1y ago
  The kernel level of the stack was already open though, this only changes the Vulkan front end which AFAIK is irrelevant to ROCm.
- suprjami 1y ago
  Depending on what you want to do, you already can. llama.cpp and other inference servers work fine on the kernel driver.
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    Where "fine" unfortunately still means "don't push it too hard on a busy desktop system or your graphical session might crash". Make sure to keep enough RAM free or you start seeing GPU resets, the stack can't cope with transient errors :-(
greatgib 1y ago
AMD is unifying its Linux Vulkan driver strategy and has decided to discontinue the AMDVLK open-source project, throwing our full support behind the RADV driver as the officially supported open-source Vulkan driver for Radeon™ graphics adapters. Scary title but good news in the end I think.
- willvarfar 1y ago
  What level of support will they give RADV? Or is it just that AMD ultimately do less?
  - account42 1y ago
    They have done pretty well with the open source OpenGL drivers that were also initially developed outside AMD. AMDVLK was always a weird regression in the openness of the development model compared to that. Maybe understandable that the bean counters wanted to share the effort between the Windows and AMD drivers but throwing away the community aspect in order to achieve that made that approach doomed from the start IMO. The initial release being incredibly late (even though Vulkan was modeled after AMD's own Mantle) was the cherry on top that allowed RADV to secure the winning seat but probably only accelerated the inevitable.
    - tonyhart7 1y ago
      why we have 2 project anyway??? what is the history??? I thought mesa is always default since I use fedora kde
      - account42 1y ago
        AMD developed their closed source Vulkan driver for Windows based on their proprietary shader compiler from their existing proprietary OpenGL driver (amdgpu-pro). They promised to release this driver as open source but didn't want to release the shader compiler for who knows what reason so this took them a while. Meanwhile David Airlie (Red Hat) and Bas Nieuwenhuizen (student at the time) didn't want to wait for that or were just looking for a challenge and wrote their own open source Vulkan driver (radv) which got pretty good results from the start. Linux distributions prefer open source drivers so this one quickly became the default. One AMD released the open-source version of their driver (amdvlk) it was faster than radv in some games but not decidedly so. It was also not an open project but rather just an open source release of their proprietary driver with a different shader compiler. So there wasn't really any reason for the open source developers to abandon their work on radv and switch to amdvlk. But they could and did use amdvlk to learn from it and improve radv so it was still useful. When Valve decided to contribute directly to Linux graphics drivers, radv was already winning so they backed that one as well. Note that this is only about the user-space portion of the driver - the kernel part of the Linux drivers is shared by all of these as well as the OpenGL drivers - there used to be a proprietary kernel driver from AMD as well but that was abandoned with the switch to the "amdgpu-pro" package.
andy_ppp 1y ago
I always think just open sourcing the whole software stack for graphics cards would be an excellent thing for hardware manufacturers, in the end these are free pieces of software and I've certain there would be a big community contributing loads of cool things for free. AMD (say) would also sell a load more hardware as enthusiast features would be added by the community. Maybe I'm just naive but the downsides of doing this seem absolutely minimal and the upsides quite large.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I still do not understand why they don't it makes their hardware basically good for life, since now you can run it on any OS if you really want to put the effort in to wire it all up.
  - dcan 1y ago
    Patents and licensing, usually https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291
    - giancarlostoro 1y ago
      Ah so HDMI is one part of it, that's really unfortunate. Thank you for this insight.
  - andy_ppp 1y ago
    It's tragic that the patent system, that is meant to make sharing IP better, actually is used to extract rents from the everyone... Software patents much like maths should clearly be illegal.
- ChocolateGod 1y ago
  That's easier said than done, AMD and Nvidia probably have licensed and patented code etc in their closed-source drivers, which would make it difficult to open source, where as a project open source from the get go won't have these issues. Nvidia got around this on their kernel driver by moving most of it to the cards firmware.
tracker1 1y ago
I've been running an RX 9070XT since close to release... I've also been running PopOS Cosmic Alpha for the past few months and for better game compatibility been sticking close to the latest mainline kernel. Just yesterday, I tried getting ROCm working to see of I could use StableDiffusion. Well, in the end 6.16 is currently unsupported and after a few hours of fail, I managed to get the in the box kernel module working again and gave up. It is emphatically nice that many/most games now run through Mesa/Vulkan+Proton without issue... but it would be nice to actually be able to use some of the vaulted AI features in AMD's top current card in the leading edge Linux Kernel release with their platform. Hopefully sooner than later, this will all "just work" mostly and won't be nearly the exercise in frustration for someone who hasn't been actively in the AI culture. I could create a partition for a prior distro/kernel or revert back, but I probably shouldn't have to, in general I tend to expect leading edge releases to work in the Linux ecosystem, or at least relatively quickly patched up.
- tylerflick 1y ago
  ROCm is a mess. I gave up on it and decided to run OpenCL on Vulkan: https://github.com/kpet/clvk https://github.com/kpet/clvk
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Thanks... I haven't really followed ANY AI stuff up to this point, other than awareness that it exists... so have to say, my shallow dive yesterday was a bit off-putting to say the least. I'll dig into this over the weekend when I invariably try again.
- Symmetry 1y ago
  On Ubuntu 25.04 I use this to get ROCm up sudo apt install hipcc rocm-smi rocminfo clinfo This won't get the newest, shiniest ROCm but it's fine for my purposes.
- JonChesterfield 1y ago
  Rocm is vulnerable to kernel version. You want linux 6.11 for rocm 6.4 and linux 6.14 for rocm 7, and that isn't very negotiable.
throwdbaaway 1y ago
Huh I just moved to AMDVLK yesterday, after learning that it has 50% more PP on llama.cpp compared to RADV: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1nabcek/comment/ncvcf7r/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1nabcek/comment...

154 points by haunter 1y ago

What will AMD do with Windows Vulkan driver, didn't they use amdvlk there? There was some radv on Windows experiment, it would be cool if AMD would use that.

trynumber9 1y ago
No, it was a third driver. Per AMD >Notably, AMD's closed-source Vulkan driver currently uses a different pipeline compiler, which is the major difference between AMD's open-source and closed-source Vulkan drivers.
- shmerl 1y ago
  Why are they using different compilers?
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    Bluntly: because they don't get software and never did. The hardware is actually pretty good but the software has always been terrible and it is a serious problem because NV sure could use some real competition.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      I wish hardware vendors would just stop trying to write software. The vast majority of them are terrible at it and even within the tiny minority that can ship something that doesn't non-deterministically implode during normal operation, the vast majority of those are a hostile lock-in play. Hardware vendors: Stop writing software. Instead write and publish hardware documentation sufficient for others to write the code. If you want to publish a reference implementation that's fine, but your assumption should be that its primary purpose is as a form of documentation for the people who are going to make a better one. Focus on making good hardware with good documentation. Intel had great success for many years by doing that well and have recently stumbled not because the strategy doesn't work but because they stopped fulfilling the "make good hardware" part of it relative to TSMC.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        The problem is, making hardware is hard. Screw something up, in the best case you can fix it in ucode, if you're not that lucky you can get away with a new stepping, but in the worst case you have to do a recall and not just deal with your own wasted effort, but also the wasted downstream efforts and rework costs. So a lot of the complexity of what the hardware is doing gets relegated to firmware as that is easier to patch and, especially relevant for wifi hardware before the specs get finalized, extend/adapt later on. The problem with that, in turn, is patents and trade secrets. What used to be hideable in the ASIC masks now is computer code that's more or less trivially disassemblable or to reverse engineer (see e.g. nouveau for older NVDA cards and Alyssa's work on Apple), and if you want true FOSS support, you sometimes can't fulfill other requirements at the same time (see the drama surrounding HDMI2/HDCP support for AMD on Linux). And for anything RF you get the FCC that's going to throw rocks around on top of that. Since a few years, the unique combination of RF devices (wifi, bt, 4G/5G), antenna and OS side driver has to be certified. That's why you get Lenovo devices refusing to boot when you have a non-Lenovo USB network adapter attached at boot time or when you swap the Sierra Wireless modem with an identical modem from a Dell (that only has a different VID/PID), or why you need old, long outdated Lenovo/Dell/HP/... drivers for RF devices and the "official" manufacturer ones will not work without patching. I would love a world in which everyone in the ecosystem were forced to provide interface documentation, datasheets, errata and ucode/firmware blobs with source for all their devices, but unfortunately, DRM, anti-cheat, anti-fraud and overeager RF regulatory authorities have a lot of influence over lawmakers, way more than FOSS advocates.
        yencabulator 1y ago
        Linux already maintains quirks code paths for all kinds of devices where the manufacturer "could have" updated the firmware to fix the bug but never did. It also contains quirks for Intel x86 core platform features: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/kernel/quirks.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/kerne... For the now-fashionable LLMs-on-GPUs world, it's pretty much just matrix multiplications. How many patents can reside in that? I don't expect Google to sell TPUs because that's not the business they're in, but AMD could put them in their SoCs without writing drivers: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system-architecture-tpu-vm#chips https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system-architecture-tpu-vm...
  - account42 1y ago
    Either licensing issues (maybe they don't own all parts of the closed source shader compiler) or fears that Nvidia/Intel could find out things about the hardware that AMD wants to keep secret (the fears being Unfounded doesn't make the possibility of them being a reason any less likely). Or alternatively they considered it not worth releasing it (legal review isn't free) because the LLVM back-end was supposed to replace it anyway.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > or fears that Nvidia/Intel could find out things about the hardware that AMD wants to keep secret (the fears being Unfounded doesn't make the possibility of them being a reason any less likely) When the fears are unfounded the reason isn't "Nvidia/Intel could find out things about the hardware", it's "incompetence rooted in believing something that isn't true". Which is an entirely different thing because in one case they would have a proper dilemma and in the other they would need only extricate their cranium from their rectum.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        > When the fears are unfounded the reason isn't "Nvidia/Intel could find out things about the hardware" Good luck trying to explain that to Legal. The problem at the core with everything FOSS is the patent and patent licensing minefield. Hardware patents are already risky enough to get torched by some "submarine patent" troll, the US adds software patents to that mix. And even if you think you got all the licenses you need, it might be the case that the licensing terms ban you from developing FOSS drivers/software implementing the patent, or that you got a situation like the HDMI2/HDCP situation where the DRM <insert derogatory term here> insist on keeping their shit secret, or you got regulatory requirements on RF emissions. And unless you got backing from someone very high up the chain, Corporate Legal will default to denying your request for FOSS work if there is even a slight chance it might pose a legal risk for the company.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > Hardware patents are already risky enough to get torched by some "submarine patent" troll, the US adds software patents to that mix. Software patents are indeed a scourge, but not publishing source code doesn't get you out of it. Patent trolls file overly broad patents or submarine patents on things they get included into standards so that everyone is infringing their patent because the patent covers the abstract shape of every solution to that problem rather than any specific one, or covers the specific one required by the standard. They can still prove that using binary software because your device is still observably doing the thing covered by the patent. Meanwhile arguing that this makes it harder for them to figure out that you're infringing their patent actually cuts the other way, because if plaintiffs are clever they're going to use that exact reasoning to argue for willful infringement -- that concealing the source code is evidence that you know you're infringing and trying to hide it. > And even if you think you got all the licenses you need, it might be the case that the licensing terms ban you from developing FOSS drivers/software implementing the patent, or that you got a situation like the HDMI2/HDCP situation where the DRM <insert derogatory term here> insist on keeping their shit secret, or you got regulatory requirements on RF emissions. To my knowledge there is no actual requirement that you not publish the source code for radio devices, only some language about not giving the user the option to exceed regulatory limits. But if that can be done through software then it could also be done by patching the binary or using a binary meant for another region, so it's not clear how publishing the code would change that one way or the other. More relevantly, it's pretty uncommon for a GPU to have a radio transceiver in it anyway, isn't it? On top of that, this would only be relevant to begin with for firmware and not drivers. And the recommended way of implementing DRM is to not, but supposing that you're going to do it anyway, that would only apply to the DRM code and not all the rest of it. A GPU is basically a separate processor running its own OS which is separated into various libraries and programs. The DRM code is code that shouldn't even be running unless you're currently decoding DRM'd media and could be its own optional tiny little blob even if the other 98% of the code is published.
- kimixa 1y ago
  The windows driver has 2 paths, the internal compiler, and the same LLVM as in the open source amdvlk release (though there might be things like not-yet-upstreamed changes, experimental new hardware support etc. that differ from the public version, it was fundamentally the same codebase). The same for DX12 (and any other driver that might use their PAL layer). If you want to confirm you can see all the llvm symbols in the driver's amdvlk{32,64}.dll and amdxc{32,64}.dll files. From what I remember, the internal compiler path is just stripped out for the open source amdvlk releases. I believe the intent was to slowly deprecate the internal closed compiler, and leave it more as a fallback for older hardware, with most new development happening on LLVM. Though my info is a few months out of date now, I'd be surprised if the trajectory changed that quickly.
  - account42 1y ago
    AFAIK the closed source shader compiler was/is also available for Linux in the amdgpu-pro package, just not in the open source releases.

CBLT 1y ago

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDVLK-Discontinued https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDVLK-Discontinued > This is a good but long overdue decision by AMD. RADV has long been more popular with gamers/enthusiasts on Linux than their own official driver. Thanks to Valve, Google, Red Hat, and others, RADV has evolved very nicely.

potwinkle 1y ago

This is great news for RADV development, I'm hoping someday we can even use ROCm on the open source stack.

account42 1y ago
The kernel level of the stack was already open though, this only changes the Vulkan front end which AFAIK is irrelevant to ROCm.
suprjami 1y ago
Depending on what you want to do, you already can. llama.cpp and other inference servers work fine on the kernel driver.
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Where "fine" unfortunately still means "don't push it too hard on a busy desktop system or your graphical session might crash". Make sure to keep enough RAM free or you start seeing GPU resets, the stack can't cope with transient errors :-(

greatgib 1y ago

AMD is unifying its Linux Vulkan driver strategy and has decided to discontinue the AMDVLK open-source project, throwing our full support behind the RADV driver as the officially supported open-source Vulkan driver for Radeon™ graphics adapters. Scary title but good news in the end I think.

willvarfar 1y ago
What level of support will they give RADV? Or is it just that AMD ultimately do less?
- account42 1y ago
  They have done pretty well with the open source OpenGL drivers that were also initially developed outside AMD. AMDVLK was always a weird regression in the openness of the development model compared to that. Maybe understandable that the bean counters wanted to share the effort between the Windows and AMD drivers but throwing away the community aspect in order to achieve that made that approach doomed from the start IMO. The initial release being incredibly late (even though Vulkan was modeled after AMD's own Mantle) was the cherry on top that allowed RADV to secure the winning seat but probably only accelerated the inevitable.
  - tonyhart7 1y ago
    why we have 2 project anyway??? what is the history??? I thought mesa is always default since I use fedora kde
    - account42 1y ago
      AMD developed their closed source Vulkan driver for Windows based on their proprietary shader compiler from their existing proprietary OpenGL driver (amdgpu-pro). They promised to release this driver as open source but didn't want to release the shader compiler for who knows what reason so this took them a while. Meanwhile David Airlie (Red Hat) and Bas Nieuwenhuizen (student at the time) didn't want to wait for that or were just looking for a challenge and wrote their own open source Vulkan driver (radv) which got pretty good results from the start. Linux distributions prefer open source drivers so this one quickly became the default. One AMD released the open-source version of their driver (amdvlk) it was faster than radv in some games but not decidedly so. It was also not an open project but rather just an open source release of their proprietary driver with a different shader compiler. So there wasn't really any reason for the open source developers to abandon their work on radv and switch to amdvlk. But they could and did use amdvlk to learn from it and improve radv so it was still useful. When Valve decided to contribute directly to Linux graphics drivers, radv was already winning so they backed that one as well. Note that this is only about the user-space portion of the driver - the kernel part of the Linux drivers is shared by all of these as well as the OpenGL drivers - there used to be a proprietary kernel driver from AMD as well but that was abandoned with the switch to the "amdgpu-pro" package.

andy_ppp 1y ago

I always think just open sourcing the whole software stack for graphics cards would be an excellent thing for hardware manufacturers, in the end these are free pieces of software and I've certain there would be a big community contributing loads of cool things for free. AMD (say) would also sell a load more hardware as enthusiast features would be added by the community. Maybe I'm just naive but the downsides of doing this seem absolutely minimal and the upsides quite large.

giancarlostoro 1y ago
I still do not understand why they don't it makes their hardware basically good for life, since now you can run it on any OS if you really want to put the effort in to wire it all up.
- dcan 1y ago
  Patents and licensing, usually https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Ah so HDMI is one part of it, that's really unfortunate. Thank you for this insight.
- andy_ppp 1y ago
  It's tragic that the patent system, that is meant to make sharing IP better, actually is used to extract rents from the everyone... Software patents much like maths should clearly be illegal.
ChocolateGod 1y ago
That's easier said than done, AMD and Nvidia probably have licensed and patented code etc in their closed-source drivers, which would make it difficult to open source, where as a project open source from the get go won't have these issues. Nvidia got around this on their kernel driver by moving most of it to the cards firmware.

tracker1 1y ago

I've been running an RX 9070XT since close to release... I've also been running PopOS Cosmic Alpha for the past few months and for better game compatibility been sticking close to the latest mainline kernel. Just yesterday, I tried getting ROCm working to see of I could use StableDiffusion. Well, in the end 6.16 is currently unsupported and after a few hours of fail, I managed to get the in the box kernel module working again and gave up. It is emphatically nice that many/most games now run through Mesa/Vulkan+Proton without issue... but it would be nice to actually be able to use some of the vaulted AI features in AMD's top current card in the leading edge Linux Kernel release with their platform. Hopefully sooner than later, this will all "just work" mostly and won't be nearly the exercise in frustration for someone who hasn't been actively in the AI culture. I could create a partition for a prior distro/kernel or revert back, but I probably shouldn't have to, in general I tend to expect leading edge releases to work in the Linux ecosystem, or at least relatively quickly patched up.

tylerflick 1y ago
ROCm is a mess. I gave up on it and decided to run OpenCL on Vulkan: https://github.com/kpet/clvk https://github.com/kpet/clvk
- tracker1 1y ago
  Thanks... I haven't really followed ANY AI stuff up to this point, other than awareness that it exists... so have to say, my shallow dive yesterday was a bit off-putting to say the least. I'll dig into this over the weekend when I invariably try again.
Symmetry 1y ago
On Ubuntu 25.04 I use this to get ROCm up sudo apt install hipcc rocm-smi rocminfo clinfo This won't get the newest, shiniest ROCm but it's fine for my purposes.
JonChesterfield 1y ago
Rocm is vulnerable to kernel version. You want linux 6.11 for rocm 6.4 and linux 6.14 for rocm 7, and that isn't very negotiable.

throwdbaaway 1y ago

Huh I just moved to AMDVLK yesterday, after learning that it has 50% more PP on llama.cpp compared to RADV: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1nabcek/comment/ncvcf7r/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1nabcek/comment...