2013: A Good Year For Open-Source AMD?

[entropy]

"go opensource" obviously means different things to different people. We said we would "support open source development efforts", ie provide documentation and/or sample code, provide a couple of developers to help with the work, and provide support to other developers by taking questions into our engineering groups on their behalf and providing answers where possible. You're obviously looking for something more, which is a fair request but not what we said we would do.

I'm perfectly fine with that.

On the other hand, are there any ideas how to attract more developers to contribute the open graphics stack?
Of course I can only speak for myself and I consider the threshold to enter this "business" to be really high.
To be honest, I wouldn't even know where to start. Reading the specs? Start to understand the available code first?

Lowering this threshold by some introductions and tutorials would be great imho.
Not sure the current devs agree. After all someone would need to write them.

Those blog posts by Alex were worth a read.
http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=50
http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=51
http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=52

[bridgman]

Hows that possible? Canadian types are the most agreeable people on the planet. I could spit in your face and then you would certainly thank me for the human contact.

I'm half German and half Irish. With a bit of effort, I can disagree with anyone on the planet

[TobiSGD]

"I've said this a few times over the years so hopefully this won't come as a surprise, but I wouldn't be buying high end cards yet if I was only planning on using them with the open source drivers, even if I could magically run the Intel open source stack on AMD or NVidia hardware."

This must be a joke. I can't think anything else.
Of course I understand that with limited developing capacities you can't have any feature of new graphics cards at release time, at least currently. May be better in the future.
But this comment is a slap in the face of anyone that owns, like me, a laptop with the 2008 released HD3200. I am still not able to use the open source drivers on this four years old hardware, which is neither high-end nor nor a recently released GPU, just because it overheats my machine and sucks out the battery in no-time. I don't care about performance or feature completeness, as long as something that is such basic for a mobile machine as power-consumption has issues that are known for a long time and are still not resolved.
Basically this means to me: If you want to buy AMD and use open-source you have to find the few GPUs that are working correctly. That is a serious show-stopper.

[Qaridarium]

Q since when are you a AMD Hater. In the past you was the biggest AMD Fanboy in the forum and now you make a 180° turn.

I'm not a AMD Hater its just so SAD... and the "Bridgman" "Rhetoric" makes me ILL.

how can anyone with a brain stand it? ?

its complete bullshit

[89c51]

This must be a joke. I can't think anything else.
Of course I understand that with limited developing capacities you can't have any feature of new graphics cards at release time, at least currently. May be better in the future.
But this comment is a slap in the face of anyone that owns, like me, a laptop with the 2008 released HD3200. I am still not able to use the open source drivers on this four years old hardware, which is neither high-end nor nor a recently released GPU, just because it overheats my machine and sucks out the battery in no-time. I don't care about performance or feature completeness, as long as something that is such basic for a mobile machine as power-consumption has issues that are known for a long time and are still not resolved.
Basically this means to me: If you want to buy AMD and use open-source you have to find the few GPUs that are working correctly. That is a serious show-stopper.

I will remind here that AMD never ever promised that will write the open-source driver by itself. They just provide docs. Its cards are meant to be used with Catalyst to fully use them. If catalyst doesn't work feel free to holler at them or buy an nvidia. But nagging about open-souce support is useless.

[Linuxhippy]

bridgman: If the 2D DDX based on Gallium3D works well, are there plans to backport it to VLIW4 (Trinity) based architectures?
Do you plan to take advantage of Trinitys UMA based nature?

Also, could you please elabortate a bit what the current state of 2D acceleration of Catalyst is?
There have been some articles on phoronix about some magical switch to turn on a new acceleration architecture, but beside some disappointing benchmark results and rendering corruptions, nothing new has been posted here on phoronix.

[bridgman]

I am still not able to use the open source drivers on this four years old hardware, which is neither high-end nor nor a recently released GPU, just because it overheats my machine and sucks out the battery in no-time. I don't care about performance or feature completeness, as long as something that is such basic for a mobile machine as power-consumption has issues that are known for a long time and are still not resolved.

Are you sure you are enabling power profiles ? Which profile are you using -- either mid or low should be OK on most HD3200 systems.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature#...gement_Options

[TobiSGD]

Are you sure you are enabling power profiles ? Which profile are you using -- either mid or low should be OK on most HD3200 systems.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature#...gement_Options

I have tried it with the both profiles, but that doesn't help a single bit, the machine still is hot and power-consumption is far to high for mobile use. I wouldn't care, since it works fine with Catalyst, but AFAIK the support from Catalyst for this card will be dropped in the near future, basically rendering this (2 1/2 years old) machine useless.

[bridgman]

bridgman: If the 2D DDX based on Gallium3D works well, are there plans to backport it to VLIW4 (Trinity) based architectures?

I guess it depends on how well it works

Seriously, other than maybe some bug fixing I don't *think* there should be any backporting required. We haven't really discussed it internally but I expect we would want it to work on Trinity as well.

Do you plan to take advantage of Trinitys UMA based nature?

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that there is probably the opportunity to eliminate some copies by taking advantage of UMA.

No in the sense that (a) I don't think we have done enough experimentation to have a good feeling for added costs of cache flushing and remapping vs saved costs of copying and (b) I don't know if there is any unreleased info required to take advantage of it so (c) we don't have a priority or plan for it yet.

I think it's fair to say that at minimum we would do some testing, figure out if any additional programming info is required, and try to get that info released. If the initial testing goes well we would probably try to push out finished code.

Note that one of the devs may already be on top of this; it just hasn't bubbled up near the top of the priority stack yet.

Also, could you please elabortate a bit what the current state of 2D acceleration of Catalyst is? There have been some articles on phoronix about some magical switch to turn on a new acceleration architecture, but beside some disappointing benchmark results and rendering corruptions, nothing new has been posted here on phoronix.

That's a harder question. I haven't had time to really talk to the Catalyst devs at all in the last few months so most of what I know is what I read online. What I do know (or at least think I know ) is :

- the acceleration related to the magical switch (AAA, sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as Direct2D because some of the low level routines were shared with Direct2D) has been enabled by default for a while, maybe a year or more

- some additional accel functions have been added for browser accel, but I don't know any details

- the variability in results seems to be related to conflicts between triple-buffering (Tear-free desktop) code added to the Catalyst driver and similar functionality in Compiz and other compositors -- too many things were turned on by default so the result was really slow

I don't know current state, ie whether compositors or Catalyst have changed defaults or whether tweaking is still required in some cases to get everything playing nice together and not being too conservative. I have seen some "ohmigod it just works" posts but not a huge number so guessing that tweaking is still required at least with some common combinations.

[LuckyCyborg]

@bridgman

What happened in MUX A+A PowerExpress support beyond Linux Catalyst 11.8?

Is there any chance that that PowerExpress support once again become functional soon?

I have a laptop where sits unused one HD5650 video card, and I am therefore obliged to use the on-board HD4200. Not really funny because that HD5650 wasn't gratis...