The Changes & New Features For Linux 4.18

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Changes & New Features For Linux 4.18

With the early release of Linux 4.18-rc1, feature development on Linux 4.18 is over and it's onto roughly eight weeks worth of testing and bug fixes. For those that are behind in their Phoronix reading with our extensive and original reporting on the Linux 4.18 merge window happenings, here is our recap of the big changes that made it into Linux 4.18. We are also in the process of firing off the start of our Linux 4.18 kernel benchmarks.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=26458

[Faalagorn]

Typo: Intei

EDIT: Also one link is pasted as plain text.

[aufkrawall]

My RX 560 doesn't switch to higher clocks with this kernel, completely unusable. Never had this with any of the amd-next kernels.

Edit: Oops, wanted to post this below the RC1 article.

[zerodefect]

I'd be interested in the touted performance improvement of the scheduler in relation to vCPUs.

[Azpegath]

Regarding the ROCm support for different generations of cards: I've been trying to get OpenCL working with the AMDGPU driver, and as far as I've understood, I need to install the OpenCL parts of the amdgpu proprietary driver.
I thought that there would be another way, a more FOSS-way, now that ROCm is in. Am I completely confused? bridgman?

[bridgman]

Regarding the ROCm support for different generations of cards: I've been trying to get OpenCL working with the AMDGPU driver, and as far as I've understood, I need to install the OpenCL parts of the amdgpu proprietary driver.
I thought that there would be another way, a more FOSS-way, now that ROCm is in. Am I completely confused? bridgman?

There are two recommended ways to get OpenCL at the moment - although now that amdkfd is substantially upstreamed there should be a third, upstream-based option soon:

1. The ROCM route... stock distro, install ROCm components including kernel, runtime, OpenCL etc... from same page

2. The packaged driver route... stock distro, install either AMDGPU or AMDGPU-PRO packages, install OpenCL with PAL or legacy option from same page

You might call them "the GitHub route" and "the amd.com route"

Right now I believe there is a slight API mismatch between out-of-tree and upstream amdkfd ioctls, as a consequence of upstream's requirement for a stable user/kernel interface. I believe we need to re-jig our out-of-tree kernel code (along with the userspace bits, mostly thunk/libhsakmt) to match the upstream ioctls. At that point it should become possible to drop ROCm userspace on top of an upstream kernel.