Hacker News

AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan project is discontinued

• 14 Comments
•    AMD is unifying its Linux Vulkan driver strategy and has decided to discontinue the AMDVLK open-source project, throwing our full support behind the RADV driver as the officially supported open-source Vulkan driver for Radeon™ graphics adapters.
  

  Scary title but good news in the end I think.

  By greatgib an hour ago

• What level of support will they give RADV? Or is it just that AMD ultimately do less?

  By willvarfar an hour ago

• They have done pretty well with the open source OpenGL drivers that were also initially developed outside AMD.
  AMDVLK was always a weird regression in the openness of the development model compared to that. Maybe understandable that the bean counters wanted to share the effort between the Windows and AMD drivers but throwing away the community aspect in order to achieve that made that approach doomed from the start IMO. The initial release being incredibly late (even though Vulkan was modeled after AMD's own Mantle) was the cherry on top that allowed RADV to secure the winning seat but probably only accelerated the inevitable.

  By account42 16 minutes ago

• They already work on radv, which is already the better vulkan driver.
  This is a matter of AMD no longer wasting time on a pointless duplicate project no-one is really interested in. They can allocate more resources for amdgpu and radv and ultimately do less overall by getting rid of the redundant project.
  Win-win.

  By arghwhat 15 minutes ago

• https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDVLK-Discontinued
  > This is a good but long overdue decision by AMD. RADV has long been more popular with gamers/enthusiasts on Linux than their own official driver. Thanks to Valve, Google, Red Hat, and others, RADV has evolved very nicely.

  By CBLT 6 hours ago

• This is great news for RADV development, I'm hoping someday we can even use ROCm on the open source stack.

  By potwinkle 2 hours ago

• The kernel level of the stack was already open though, this only changes the Vulkan front end which AFAIK is irrelevant to ROCm.

  By account42 13 minutes ago

• What will AMD do with Windows Vulkan driver, didn't they use amdvlk there? There was some radv on Windows experiment, it would be cool if AMD would use that.

  By shmerl 6 hours ago

• No, it was a third driver.
  Per AMD
  >Notably, AMD's closed-source Vulkan driver currently uses a different pipeline compiler, which is the major difference between AMD's open-source and closed-source Vulkan drivers.

  By trynumber9 5 hours ago

• The windows driver has 2 paths, the internal compiler, and the same LLVM as in the open source amdvlk release (though there might be things like not-yet-upstreamed changes, experimental new hardware support etc. that differ from the public version, it was fundamentally the same codebase). The same for DX12 (and any other driver that might use their PAL layer). If you want to confirm you can see all the llvm symbols in the driver's amdvlk{32,64}.dll and amdxc{32,64}.dll files. From what I remember, the internal compiler path is just stripped out for the open source amdvlk releases.
  I believe the intent was to slowly deprecate the internal closed compiler, and leave it more as a fallback for older hardware, with most new development happening on LLVM. Though my info is a few months out of date now, I'd be surprised if the trajectory changed that quickly.

  By kimixa an hour ago

• AFAIK the closed source shader compiler was/is also available for Linux in the amdgpu-pro package, just not in the open source releases.

  By account42 9 minutes ago

• Why are they using different compilers?

  By shmerl 5 hours ago

• Either licensing issues (maybe they don't own all parts of the closed source shader compiler) or fears that Nvidia/Intel could find out things about the hardware that AMD wants to keep secret (the fears being Unfounded doesn't make the possibility of them being a reason any less likely). Or alternatively they considered it not worth releasing it (legal review isn't free) because the LLVM back-end was supposed to replace it anyway.

  By account42 10 minutes ago

• Bluntly: because they don't get software and never did. The hardware is actually pretty good but the software has always been terrible and it is a serious problem because NV sure could use some real competition.

  By jacquesm an hour ago