Open-Source AMD Cayman GPU KMS Support

[pingufunkybeat]

Open drivers ... with decent support ... for all AMD hardware will take 15 years to accomplish, granted the development of AMD hardware will be frozen for that 15 years.

Depends on what you need. r600g is good enough for me at this moment, on 2-year old hardware. Everything else is a welcome bonus, but I can use my computer.

2 years ago, I couldn't. With an nvidia card, I still wouldn't be able to use it.

[chithanh]

Sweet, really sweet, but you don't buy 300$ card to use with opensource drivers. Wasn't this official position?

There exist people who use Linux to do work, and when they want to play games, boot into GameLoaderOS™. Certainly having basic out-of-thebox 2D and 3D acceleration will be sufficient here. The proprietary driver would just limit the kernel/X server versions that you can run.

[chithanh]

Open drivers ... with decent support ... for all AMD hardware will take 15 years to accomplish, granted the development of AMD hardware will be frozen for that 15 years. AMD indeed deserves respect for documentation and some background support behind Gallium and FOSS drivers, but they do not consider this any serious.

I ordered an AMD Zacate mobo (ASRock E350M1) the first day it was listed at e-tailers. Open source drivers enabled me to use it for all my needs on the same day when it arrived, with 2D and 3D acceleration (well actually the next day as the first was spent by Gentoo compiling).

Other people may have different use cases (video decode acceleration, OpenGL 3, ...) but for me it was more than decent.

[crazycheese]

There exist people who use Linux to do work, and when they want to play games, boot into GameLoaderOS™. Certainly having basic out-of-thebox 2D and 3D acceleration will be sufficient here. The proprietary driver would just limit the kernel/X server versions that you can run.

Your definition of "work" only needs framebuffer. WINE runs very fine with nvidiablob. In fact so fine, you don't need GameLoaderOS at all. AMD recommends you to install GameLoaderOS and have only ~1/3 subset of features in Linux your card is capable of, or 3/4 of features and crashes; while Nvidia recommends you to install proprietary driver and card will work, unless you touch multiscreen.

Of couse, this is due to nvidia having same windows and unix driver under the hood as well as various bugfixes for GameLoaderOS that even apply on Wine, but the AMD proprietary driver they are forcing on people instead of opensource is just a subset of nvidia.

I ordered an AMD Zacate mobo (ASRock E350M1) the first day it was listed at e-tailers. Open source drivers enabled me to use it for all my needs on the same day when it arrived, with 2D and 3D acceleration (well actually the next day as the first was spent by Gentoo compiling).

Other people may have different use cases (video decode acceleration, OpenGL 3, ...) but for me it was more than decent.

You don't use zacate for its primary case - video decode acceleration? Already outdated ion beats zacate on linux in every possible way. "Thanks" to drivers. You could save money and just buy low-entry athlon II and add first generation Radeon for the same result in linux. Luckily processors don't need extra drivers of such extent, otherwise you would just have to use GameLoaderOS for anything x86 related and also accept this just as you accept current situation.

[chithanh]

I do use OpenGL compositing with kwin, which is not possible without 3D acceleration. And wine supports only a selection of some new and many old games. Plus, it requires 32 bit compatibility libraries which I do not want to pollute my 64 bit Linux system with.

You say that the primary case for zacate is video decode acceleration, but I think there is no basis for that claim. It is one use case of many and not relevant for productivity.

[allquixotic]

I use a relatively fixed number of 3d-accelerated applications on Linux, and all of them seem to be pretty well-supported with r600g. So I don't see the problem with running r600g with a high-end GPU (I have a HD5970).

1. Second Life / Imprudence / other forks of the metaverse viewers. These use OpenGL 2.1 and generally work fine. Across all hardware and OSes, the framerate in this software is severely limited by available CPU; I get 20 FPS in some areas regardless of using Windows 7 x64, Linux with Catalyst, or r600g. I used the Catalyst Control Center on Windows to verify that the GPU utilization is quite low while rendering a complex scene at 20 FPS in this application; but my 8 CPU threads are practically pegged, with one or two cores being constantly pegged by a small number of CPU-hogging single threads, and the remaining hardware threads being used for the less busy app threads. The bottleneck seems to be in the 1 or 2 threads that peg a core apiece; there's a lot of stuff that isn't (or can't be) parallelized at all, it's probably because of the dynamic nature of the content.

2. Savage 2, an OpenGL 2.1 game. It works mostly OK these days, with only a few non-fatal rendering problems. Great frame rate.

3. OilRush -- eh, I'll probably play it with Catalyst until I get bored of it (a few days at most) and then I won't have this requirement anymore.

4. Desktop compositing works great.

Sure, I could probably get away with a smaller, cheaper GPU and accomplish these tasks, but what happens then if OpenGL 3.0 is supported on r600g next year, and it's enough to run Unigine games? Probably by then the major bottlenecks in r600g would be freed up and I could start seeing playable FPS on Unigine games. But not if I had a little tiny passive card -- those wouldn't have enough horsepower to give me the detail levels and FPS I want on Unigine.

[Qaridarium]

Alex, that is wonderful. I can't imagine someone would use 69xx with r600g, but it is a certainly solid base for the future AMD GPUS.

i think you are wrong there are people with an hd5970 running r600g

and a hd6970 is cheap compared to that card.

[pingufunkybeat]

If the only selling point for the nvidia blob now is that you can run Windows games using a Windows 3d API, a windows input subsystem, using a modified Windows 3d driver, then we're doing fine.

People installing the Linux kernel on a Windows operating system and playing games like that are just plain weird and not typical for Linux.

[Drago]

i think you are wrong there are people with an hd5970 running r600g

and a hd6970 is cheap compared to that card.

Q, you are an exception. By any means

[crazycheese]

If the only selling point for the nvidia blob now is that you can run Windows games using a Windows 3d API, a windows input subsystem, using a modified Windows 3d driver, then we're doing fine.

You forget video accel(now happily AMD has this partially if you put a fight vs it), LARGE hardware & software support window and most important, when you buy nvidia card, nvidia linux dev get money from that.
Buying AMD card is windows driver support, - you buy 300 dollar amd card for linux - in fact you pay 300 dollar for windows. You need to buy FireGL to support fglrx.

And opensource guys explicitly want their driver stay weak and do not want to talk about monetary support. AMD explicitly wants to keep opensource unofficial and legacy. They are proprietary company, exactly same as nvidia crap. People buy AMD because of its opensource support and AMD cares crap about it, it gives you officially periodically broken fglrx.

People installing the Linux kernel on a Windows operating system and playing games like that are just plain weird and not typical for Linux.

Typical for linux is to be able to achieve anything you want. Typical for linux is to remove any barriers. Typical for windows is to put everyone under its fat rear without options and warranties and make them pay on regular basis for NOTHING. When only interface to linux was terminal one group of people claimed its os for terminal only and another group ported xfree86.

You buy AMD you support linux stay 0,1%. You buy AMD discrete you need windows. You buy nvidia you do not need windows. If you want framebuffer you can buy any card. The secret to graphic driver power are engineers. The secret to get engineers is money. Are there are many people that want to pay for amd opensource? A LOT. Does AMD care to gather the money and start improvement - no. It refers to how bad drivers are.

Now people with Oilrush & desura buy nvidia hardware and it works, and AMD promises, promises, sums up, refers to dead statistics, blocks linux improvements and nvidia gives people support and they give nvidia money - as simple as that.