Typical really, the day after I do a review of 2017 and mention how AMD announced they would finally release it, but still didn't, they then go and do it today. The 'AMDVLK' is now officially under the MIT license!
The announcement I saw came courtesy of Matthäus G. Chajdas from AMD on Twitter, which was retweeted by another developer I follow to end up in my timeline.
The curious thing now, is what will happen in the open source driver space for AMD GPUs. Since the Mesa RADV driver has come a long way, it will be interesting to see what happens between the two efforts. It is entirely seperate to Mesa, with it being built to work with AMD's Platform Abstraction Library (PAL). That's the awesome thing, their PAL is also now open source under the MIT license.
Since it confused me at first: the xgl repository has the Vulkan implementation that sits on top of the PAL code. The actual AMDVLK repository is information about it all.
AMD have listed support for these GPUs:
- Radeon™ HD 7000 Series
- Radeon™ HD 8000M Series
- Radeon™ R5/R7/R9 200/300 Series
- Radeon™ RX 400/500 Series
- Radeon™ M200/M300/M400 Series
- Radeon™ RX Vega Series
- AMD FirePro™ Workstation Wx000/Wx100/Wx300 Series
- Radeon™ Pro WX x100 Series
- Radeon™ Pro 400/500 Series
AMD are only listing support for Ubuntu 16.04.3 and RedHat 7.4 right now, but hopefully now it's fully open work can be done to enable good support for a wider selection of distributions.
It sure took them a while, but with open source releases they do end up having to go through legal hoops to ensure there's nothing in the code that they're not actually allowed to open source. There's probably plenty of other checks it has to go through too, but it is fantastic that AMD have done this.
You can see the full repository on GitHub here. For some extra background info, see this article on the gpuopen website.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Seeing the PAL code though.
Last edited by STiAT on 22 December 2017 at 12:54 pm UTC
QuoteWe open sourced our @VulkanAPI driver for lots of Radeon GPUs! That includes PAL, our low-level abstraction that the Vulkan and D3D12 drivers are built on top of!
So it is basically AMD official driver open sourced for both Linux *and* Windows. People making graphics engines for cross platform certainly will like additional ways to debug their problems.
Quoting: STiATHmh, I don't see anything released ... am I missing the source code? There is none visible for me in the repo.From the Telegram Group chat, the AMDVLK is just info. The xgl repo is the vulkan api implementation that works with the PAL code.
Seeing the PAL code though.
Quoting: EikeNobody should mention this other website now...! ;)
Quoting: EikeNobody should mention this other website now...! ;)I'm assuming you mean Phoronix? I feel like I'm missing something?
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: STiATHmh, I don't see anything released ... am I missing the source code? There is none visible for me in the repo.From the Telegram Group chat, the AMDVLK is just info. The xgl repo is the vulkan api implementation that works with the PAL code.
Seeing the PAL code though.
Ahh, ye, looks good. I'll start digging :-).
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