Valve Developer Andres Rodriguez Lands First Patches Into RADV Vulkan Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Developer Andres Rodriguez Lands First Patches Into RADV Vulkan Driver

Andres Rodriguez, a former AMD engineer who joined Valve back in November to begin working on their Linux efforts, has begun landing commits into Mesa Git for the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RADV-Vulkan-Andres-Begins

[humbug]

In the last few months Valve seems to be pretty focused on helping AMD to improve Vulkan and VR performance on Linux.

Obviously they want to get to a point where they can stop including AMDGPU PRO on steamOS, then they will ask their partners and their own devs as well to target the open source drivers exclusively for AMD hardware. Once the transition is done it will be easier for devs who only have to test with one set of AMD drivers. OpenGL is already in good shape, the Vulkan driver needs to still become faster before Valve can totally drop AMD proprietary.

Think the reason Valve wants to hurry things along in that direction is because AMD told them the longterm plan on Linux is open source drivers for gamers and proprietary drivers for workstation. Valve's target is not FirePro users so...

[funfunctor]

The corporate flip side of AMD will continue and look stupid while doing so.

They may as well just drop Linux support from their Pro driver since no one really cares about the userspace component (on Linux specifically) of it now, less the OpenCL component which would be useful to opensource. The opensource stack is eclipsing that of the closed-source one and the open flip side of AMD will continue to see benefit in that. Eventually the economics will catch up with the absurdity but that will take a long time I suspect.

In any case, provided AMD continue to contribute to the kernel and llvm side, that is the bulk of the critical parts of the stack.

[dungeon]

Shame on you Nintendo You do Mario and i started working on a opensource clone instead... so now really shame on you, as you should open up original.

I really never understood this... other than it is click bait

[brk0_0]

For me, Valve is indicating that it will launch it's own hardware for months now. Steam Machines by partners didn't sell very well, but instead of dropping Linux, Valve continues to hire people to work on this project. VR is coming, better drivers are coming, we're getting more and more games, and the Steam client is getting better every day. I wouldn't be surprised if they announced a new console, made by Valve, along with new games.

[Tomin]

They may as well just drop Linux support from their Pro driver since no one really cares about the userspace component (on Linux specifically) of it now, less the OpenCL component which would be useful to opensource.

People seem to forget that the reason why AMDGPU PRO exists is that ***corporate customers*** want it. They need the compatibility context that Mesa is unable to provide. Anyway I think that the extra effort that goes into AMDGPU PRO driver for Linux is lesser than it was for fglrx/Catalyst because most of the driver is the same as on Windows and the other parts are somewhat shared with the open source driver. I don't see any wasted resources here.

[humbug]

For me, Valve is indicating that it will launch it's own hardware for months now. Steam Machines by partners didn't sell very well, but instead of dropping Linux, Valve continues to hire people to work on this project. VR is coming, better drivers are coming, we're getting more and more games, and the Steam client is getting better every day. I wouldn't be surprised if they announced a new console, made by Valve, along with new games.

Valve was always in this for the longhaul, I don't think it really means that they will make their own Linux based console.

Rather, there are other reasons
-on the longterm they want to push PC gaming into a direction where cross-platfrom development is the norm and the game engines/tools/APIs used etc are such that it is mostly a nobrainer for developers to support both windows and Linux.
-Valve figures that this move improves the sustainability of their steam store business on the longterm. i.e. even if Microsoft highjacks them they can downscale and operate the store in smaller but still profitable way on Linux.
-Even though they are making a loss on this venture they do not mind because they are very cash rish and can afford to do so. They have no shareholders forcing them to drop a non-profitable project. So it's a strategic investment for them so they will stay on it for years.

Obviously valve also hopes that desktop linux will take off in the mainstream so that they can increase the steam linux market share. But they know that this is something they cannot control, they know that that battle is outside their scope and is upto Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mint etc. So they will focus on the gaming ecosystem and hope that other breakthroughs happen in the wider ecosystem.

[andre30correia]

I always say, amd give up from non free driver in linux and put half of ppl who work in this garbage driver working in opensource driver like intel, having two official drivers is stupid

[bridgman]

The corporate flip side of AMD will continue and look stupid while doing so.

They may as well just drop Linux support from their Pro driver since no one really cares about the userspace component (on Linux specifically) of it now, less the OpenCL component which would be useful to opensource. The opensource stack is eclipsing that of the closed-source one and the open flip side of AMD will continue to see benefit in that. Eventually the economics will catch up with the absurdity but that will take a long time I suspect.

Don't forget the workstation market... as long as workstation apps require compatibility profiles and Mesa does not support them we will continue to need the proprietary driver. Remember that was the reason we created amdgpu-pro in the first place - but it was also temporarily valuable in the consumer space until we had GL 4.5 support and decent performance in the open driver.

When we are finished the only significant difference between the two drivers will be the GL userspace bits plus any non-upstreamable kernel code (eg support for legacy APIs which require hard-pinning from userspace without the option of transparent eviction).

Or are you saying we are stupid for pursuing the workstation market in the first place ?

[totoz]

What is blocking the open-sourcing of AMD's Vulkan driver? Are there some legal/PR issues to be solved?