AMD Is Still Moving Towards A Unified Open-Source Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Is Still Moving Towards A Unified Open-Source Driver

Earlier this year I delivered the exclusive news how AMD was looking at a new Linux driver strategy for Catalyst that involved leveraging the open-source Radeon DRM kernel driver. The strategy at the time effectively meant just making Catalyst a user-space blob and riding off the open-source Radeon kernel driver to share more common code and hopefully lead to a better experience. It looks like this driver strategy is moving forward...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTc5ODE

[dungeon]

Which is great, Catalyst users will never complain again that there is no kernel support in time nor need to compile module

[Luke_Wolf]

See... What'd I tell you Michael? "no comment" and stone walling rarely mean a project is dead in politispeak, it usually just means "We're really not ready to talk about that just yet."

[peppercats]

good

there's absolutely zero reason to keep catalyst closed source when mesa is catching up so fast, at this point it has to just be a duplication of effort

[dungeon]

good

there's absolutely zero reason to keep catalyst closed source when mesa is catching up so fast, at this point it has to just be a duplication of effort

Well mesa is at OpenGL 3.3 and fglrx is at 4.4 + it has vendor GL extensions and other features for workstations users, which mesa does not ever intended to support . And it has OpenCL 2.0 now... all of which i am not sure opensource will get in next many many years .

Let say i am a developer who uses Linux and want to make OpenGL 4.4+ game engine or whatever, how i can test that with opensource driver?

[grndzro]

Well mesa is at OpenGL 3.3 and fglrx is at 4.4 + it has vendor GL extensions and other features for workstations users, which mesa does not ever intended to support . And it has OpenCL 2.0 now... all of which i am not sure opensource will get in next many many years .

Let say i am a developer who uses Linux and want to make OpenGL 4.4+ game engine or whatever, how i can test that with opensource driver?

I think I heard the goal is to make both drivers installed at the same time allowing switching between the 2. Weather that allows features from both being used at the same time is still unknown.
Being able to upgrade the kernel to the latest version without breaking fglrx will be great.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

good

there's absolutely zero reason to keep catalyst closed source when mesa is catching up so fast, at this point it has to just be a duplication of effort

Mesa's catching up because AMD Developers are coding for it.

[dungeon]

I think I heard the goal is to make both drivers installed at the same time allowing switching between the 2. Weather that allows features from both being used at the same time is still unknown.
Being able to upgrade the kernel to the latest version without breaking fglrx will be great.

My expecations are opposite, first i expect is what you mentioned last . Features which came by that (no maintaince of kernel part by flgrx team) of course i am just guessing, should be possible

[smitty3268]

Let say i am a developer who uses Linux and want to make OpenGL 4.4+ game engine or whatever, how i can test that with opensource driver?

If you are developing an engine, you'd better be testing it against all kinds of hardware and drivers, and you can test the GL4.4 stuff against both NVidia and fglrx. OSS drivers too.

[dungeon]

If you are developing an engine, you'd better be testing it against all kinds of hardware and drivers, and you can test the GL4.4 stuff against both NVidia and fglrx. OSS drivers too.

Oh, how i can test OpenGL 4.4 on OSS drivers? Let alone Crossfire setup

Just talking i am not that developer, but i realise thing like that are imposibille right now