AMD Planning For Launch-Day Vega Open-Source & AMDGPU-PRO Support

This shouldn't come as a surprise for any long-time Phoronix readers, but AMD is hoping to have both the fully-open driver support as well as the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver ready for Vega's launch-day later this year.

AMD confirmed yesterday during their earnings call that they are still on track with Ryzen for Q1 and shipping Vega in Q2.

Today, John Bridgman confirmed today in our forums that both their open and hybrid drivers should be ready for Vega's launch-day. He commented, "Yes, we plan to have both [open and AMDGPU-PRO] options available at launch day, plus a ROCM stack."

It shouldn't be a big surprise, though hearing plans for ROCM support on launch-day is also welcome for their new OpenCL/compute stack. Last year AMD did deliver on both open and -PRO driver support for their Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" launch day and things have been looking like they'll be able to deliver for Vega launch-day.

The only uncertainty at this point is whether we'll see Vega's open-source support within stable versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa in time for launch-day or not. It may very well be that there is open-source support available, but only via Git or even further out -- just available via a public Git branch (or patches) to the kernel or Mesa. Vega's Linux support only has DAL/DC support with no non-DAL support, so first we need to see DC/DAL support ready for merging before we'll find Vega support in the AMDGPU kernel driver.

DAL/DC isn't ready for Linux 4.11 so that's then Linux 4.12 at the earliest for seeing DAL/DC and Vega support in the mainline kernel. At least there shouldn't be any major complications for Vega support in RadeonSI Gallium3D, albeit, that part is useless without the DRM kernel driver. At least with AMDGPU-PRO packaging its own DKMS module and already making use of DC/DAL, the Vega support should be there in an easy to deploy manner, assuming you are running that driver on one of their supported Linux distributions (for now that's very limited, but once they have newer kernel support in AMDGPU-PRO, it should be less of a pain).