On 04/26/2018 05:18 AM, Pierre Neidhardt wrote: > > Joshua Branson <jbra...@fastmail.com> writes: > >> That's actually a really good point. I forgot about that. Isn't radeon >> close to having free drivers? > > I thought it was entirely free already, isn't it? > To my understanding, it's AMDGPU that is partly proprietary. > According to the latest Phoronix benchmarks, the free Radeon performs > really well.
There is a bunch of entirely FOSS drivers for AMD Radeon cards: Kernel drivers: radeon: for older cards before GCN1.2 (kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/radeon) amdgpu: for the new cards since GCN1.2 (kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu) Userspace drivers: radeonsi: for almost all cards in the last decade (mesa/src/gallium/drivers/radeonsi) r600: for the ones before (mesa/src/gallium/drivers/r600) Vulkan drivers: RADV: written by the community (RedHat etc.), because AMD initially didn't make their Vulkan userspace FOSS (mesa/src/amd/vulkan) AMDVLK: AMDs Vulkan driver released as FOSS (https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK) So your FOSS driver would consist of amdgpu + radeonsi + radv and is in almost all cases the best choice (performance, stability etc). Then there was always a propriatary driver by AMD nowadays it's called "Radeon Software for Linux", which bundles also free software like AMDVLK and ROCm. Other names before were "AMDGPU-PRO", "AMD Catalyst" and "fglrx"... I hope it's now less confusing then before :P Jonathan
