Southern Islands Support Will Come To AMDGPU On Linux 4.9

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Southern Islands Support Will Come To AMDGPU On Linux 4.9

One month after the first AMDGPU feature pull of new functionality for DRM-Next to in turn land in Linux 4.9, the second feature pull request has now been sent out and it presents experimental Southern Islands (GCN 1.0) support for AMDGPU...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-SI-Next-4.9

[dungeon]

CIK was experimental since beginning, whatever that "experimentally supported" means

[dungeon]

I would say both are supported by radeon, but experimentally unsupported by amdgpu

[fakenmc]

Excellent news.

[ElectricPrism]

Great news so AMDGPU can be used by as many as possible.

[eydee]

Good news, waiting for announcement for SI being moved to legacy in less than 2 years though.

[bridgman]

Good news, waiting for announcement for SI being moved to legacy in less than 2 years though.

... and then SI support would be dropped from the closed-source drivers everyone wants us to kill and only supported by the open source drivers everyone wants us to keep ? Sounds awful.

It does raise an interesting question though for closed-source drivers which we have open-sourced...

[darkbasic]

... and then SI support would be dropped from the closed-source drivers everyone wants us to kill and only supported by the open source drivers everyone wants us to keep ? Sounds awful.

It does raise an interesting question though for closed-source drivers which we have open-sourced...

No one will care if Catalyshit will go legacy (for me PRO and Catalyst will be synonyms until it will run properly on a FOSS kernel/libdrm).

[Veerappan]

... and then SI support would be dropped from the closed-source drivers everyone wants us to kill and only supported by the open source drivers everyone wants us to keep ? Sounds awful.

It does raise an interesting question though for closed-source drivers which we have open-sourced...

I'm also wondering about what is likely to happen for the closed user-space driver on the open amdgpu kernel.

In theory the linux kernel is supposed to preserve backwards compatibility with user-space. If/when AMD drops support from AMDGPU PRO for a given generation and the open-source kernel driver supports all of the necessary interfaces, there's no reason someone couldn't keep using the closed blob with the open kernel driver on new kernel versions forever (or at least a good long time).

So next time that you guys drop support for a given GPU generation, the impact will be much smaller than what it was previously. Users will still be able to upgrade kernel/X versions while using the same version of the closed-source user-space binary they had before. No new GL/CL/whatever bugfixes, but they're not stuck on an old kernel like they used to be.

And if they eventually want other bug fixes or new features, the mesa drivers might do what they need (it already does most of what the average user needs anyway).

[bridgman]

Yep... keeping things working for specific HW configurations should be pretty straightforward... I'm thinking more about what goes into distro images, where one disk image needs to work on lebenty million different systems old and new.

In principle it should be as simple as tweaking the code so that the older driver is only used on dropped hardware and current driver is used on newer HW... which implies some kind of ICD system, which both OpenCL and Vulkan have... so I *think* we should be OK...

But it's worth thinking about.