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With Mesa coming along rather nicely in the latest releases, Feral Interactive are requesting that Canonical push out Mesa updates to their official graphics driver PPA to help Feral officially support Mesa in their Linux ports.
Part of the problem is that Mesa on Ubuntu is often outdated, meaning if Feral (and other game developers) want to give support for it, there needs to be an easy and tested way to get the latest open source GPU drivers.
Adding tested packages to the official PPA would be an ideal solution for now:
You can see the full mailing list entry here.
Hopefully this will get sorted, so users on AMD and Intel can get the best gaming experience possible on Ubuntu.
Not everyone is comfortable compiling things, and I agree that users shouldn't be required to go and compile graphics drivers to get stable versions of Mesa. While there are other PPA's around, they usually provide packages from git which can come with all sorts of breakage. This could benefit a lot of people.
Additional note: The less PPA's people have to add, the more secure they may be. It was an issue raised in our IRC that people flock to all sorts of random PPA's (guilty!), so having a trusted one for this would be awesome. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Edwin, FeralWe have been working with the Mesa community to help improve the Mesa drivers so more games can run on AMD and Intel hardware, and in the last year this has started to hit the tipping point and support has become more and more viable when using the very latest drivers.
Part of the problem is that Mesa on Ubuntu is often outdated, meaning if Feral (and other game developers) want to give support for it, there needs to be an easy and tested way to get the latest open source GPU drivers.
Edwin, FeralThe biggest issue we have is there is no way for a user to officially download and install the latest stable versions of Mesa. For example because the official Mesa 13.0.1 release isn’t available to install on Ubuntu, you need to compile it yourself.
Adding tested packages to the official PPA would be an ideal solution for now:
Edwin, FeralI’d like to suggest that official Mesa releases are also added to the graphics-drivers PPA using the release information on the mesa.org website: http://www.mesa3d.org/relnotes.html
You can see the full mailing list entry here.
Hopefully this will get sorted, so users on AMD and Intel can get the best gaming experience possible on Ubuntu.
Not everyone is comfortable compiling things, and I agree that users shouldn't be required to go and compile graphics drivers to get stable versions of Mesa. While there are other PPA's around, they usually provide packages from git which can come with all sorts of breakage. This could benefit a lot of people.
Additional note: The less PPA's people have to add, the more secure they may be. It was an issue raised in our IRC that people flock to all sorts of random PPA's (guilty!), so having a trusted one for this would be awesome. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
I do agree with this but the PPAs should also have the option to be enabled from the Additional Drivers program to make it even easier for the end user to enable these updates on their system.
Canonical should also provide the same option for AMDGPU-PRO and the nVidia drivers. I know there is already a PPA for nVidia but my biggest complaint about that is how it splits off each driver branch into its own set of packages which makes updates annoying at times because you have to switch from one branch to another.
Canonical should also provide the same option for AMDGPU-PRO and the nVidia drivers. I know there is already a PPA for nVidia but my biggest complaint about that is how it splits off each driver branch into its own set of packages which makes updates annoying at times because you have to switch from one branch to another.
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Quoting: JohnersCanonical should also provide the same option for AMDGPU-PRO
It is probably best they don't; Adding yet another AMD driver option only confuses consumers and introduces extra variables for developers especially when the pro stack really isn't geared towards them and is, as the name suggests, for professionals.
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abelthorne Nov 18, 2016
Quoting: TingPingIsn't "pro" for "proprietary", as AMDGPU-PRO is supposed to replace Catalyst?Quoting: JohnersCanonical should also provide the same option for AMDGPU-PRO
It is probably best they don't; Adding yet another AMD driver option only confuses consumers and introduces extra variables for developers especially when the pro stack really isn't geared towards them and is, as the name suggests, for professionals.
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Quoting: abelthorneIsn't "pro" for "proprietary", as AMDGPU-PRO is supposed to replace Catalyst?
It replaces Catalyst for "professionals". So users of CAD software, video editing suites, etc that require OpenCL, OpenGL compat mode, support contracts, etc that the open stack doesn't provide.
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buenaventura Nov 18, 2016
I would love to have a ppa for the linux kernel 4.9 with southern islands support enabled, and a ppa with stable current amd-gpu (and -PRO also pretty please). I consider myself quite l33t haxxor at this stuff most of the time, but drivers and kernel and stuff are just too confusing.
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ElectricPrism Nov 18, 2016
Not a ubuntu user but mesa 13 is totally ready for prime time. canonical dragging feet will just make other distros more attractive to switch to.
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I don't understand why distributions like Ubuntu don't stick up with current Mesa releases. It is not like Mesa API or ABI changes with every update and whole distribution needs recompiling. The API/ABI is mostly OpenGL, which is backward-compatible practically to the very beginning. Mesa also has very solid development process and continuous integration infrastructure, so regressions are extremely rare and quickly fixed.
I see no reason for Ubuntu released last year not getting an updated to Mesa 13.0.1. Getting it compiled with LLVM recent enough for full functionality of the Radeon drivers might be a problem, though.
I see no reason for Ubuntu released last year not getting an updated to Mesa 13.0.1. Getting it compiled with LLVM recent enough for full functionality of the Radeon drivers might be a problem, though.
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natewardawg Nov 18, 2016
I'm not an AMD user, but I think this would be awesome for those who are! :)
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