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AMD talks about their driver strategy going forward.

Jodell88

Jodell88

Diamond Member
What AMD's seeking to do by changing up their high-performance Linux driver is having a completely free kernel driver that's relied upon by Catalyst and would live within the mainline Linux kernel in order to ease support for Linux consumers. When installing the AMD Catalyst driver (or NVIDIA's binary driver) right now a full compiler stack is needed on the system in order to compile the "shim" code sitting between the Linux kernel interfaces and the binary kernel driver. The compiler support is needed locally due to the many different Linux kernel versions out there without having a stable Linux kernel API/ABI. Additionally, there's some legal restrictions in being able to easily redistribute compiled non-open-source kernel modules that link against the kernel. If the Catalyst closed-source driver was isolated to user-space, there wouldn't be these issues with regard to Linux kernel fragmentation, having the need for a compiler to be present on the local system, and there wouldn't be any incompatibility issues with new Linux kernel releases. As the Catalyst driver stands now, it can be several weeks to months after a major stable kernel release before there's an official Catalyst update that properly supports new Linux kernel releases for API/ABI compatibility.


Having only one Linux kernel driver for both the Mesa/Gallium3D and Catalyst drivers would in the end also lead to more centralized collaboration and improvements on the driver, less code duplication, and overall a more open-source driver. The user-space Catalyst code would remain closed-source with no indications of that code being opened up, at least not in the foreseeable future. New hardware enablement, features, and other improvements should land much faster too then in the Radeon Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver should there only be this one kernel driver. This approach would also lead to Wayland/Mir support on Catalyst with using the Radeon KMS driver, as long as the Catalyst user-space then exposed the necessary EGL extensions.
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http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_kernel&num=1

If AMD can can deliver, this will be awesome. 🙂
 
Wow that would be great! I already find ATI is better on Linux (had issues with nvidia) but this is great news.

What I'd love to see is proper multi monitor support (not workarounds where it treats two monitors as one) across multiple video cards. It seems nobody can figure that out on Linux. Maybe this will lead to that.
 
Hmm, it would be nice, but, I don't think it would be that easy to get those changes into the kernel, but, I guess we have to wait and see how they exactly do this.
 
Elixer said:
Hmm, it would be nice, but, I don't think it would be that easy to get those changes into the kernel, but, I guess we have to wait and see how they exactly do this.
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Agreed. There lies the issue as they say. It would be fantastic if this gets done though.
 
Elixer said:
Hmm, it would be nice, but, I don't think it would be that easy to get those changes into the kernel, but, I guess we have to wait and see how they exactly do this.
Click to expand...

Shouldn't be too hard. Just tell them we'll bring Mantle to linux.
And make the whole thing public.
 
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