On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 12:51:19PM -0400, Jason DeRose wrote:
On Mon, Aug 15, 2016, at 05:18 AM, Stefan Dirsch wrote:
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 11:35:29PM -0400, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
On 8/13/16 3:15 PM, Jason DeRose wrote:
Hello there!
I was hoping it would possible to enable CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU_CIK in the stable kernel builds?
This would allow AMD Hawaii owners to use the new "amdgpu" drivers. As it stands, those wanting reasonable 3D performance can't upgrade past kernel 4.4 because the proprietary "fglrx" driver is obsoleted in later versions, leaving "radeon" as the only choice.
I have compiled locally with this config setting and the amdgpu driver seems to work pretty well. I don't think this would affect anyone negatively as users would still need to manually disable the "radeon" driver and pass the kernel parameter to enable amdgpu on experimental hardware before the driver would be chosen.
Thank you for the consideration!
Egbert, Stefan -
Do you have an opinion here? I left it disabled because it was marked as experimental (and still is).
Not exactly, but: 'Sea islands' GPUs (Kaveri, Bonaire, Hawaii, Kabini, mullins) are also supported by radeon driver, so one needs to blacklist that driver on target systems with CI GPUs (and only on these!) in order to switch to amdgpu driver. As long as this remains unknown enabling it would be rather useless.
Also once amdgpu support for CIK is considered stable, one needs to disable support in radeon driver. Hope upstream is not going to forget this ...
So, if we want to enable it on SUSE, we need to disable it in radeon driver. So this would mean a patch, which may never become upstream ...
Thanks, Stefan
Just to be clear - I wasn't suggesting that radeon be blacklisted for Sea Island yet. But, with CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU_CIK=y set the user then has the option to blacklist radeon and choose amdgpu instead themselves.
I'm a bit afraid, that it will be random at the end, which driver will get active, when two drivers are available. This may result in a lot of confusion. I would like to avoid that by removing support in radeon driver in case we decide to support Sea Islands GPUs via amdgpu driver.
I do not think there is a concern that users will not know about it - Any owners of these cards currently who are using fglrx will find that it no longer works once upgrading beyond kernel 4.4, and go searching for an answer (which is the way that I ended up here). There is quite a bit of discussion out there about these cards being essentially orphaned, especially for distros that have already made fixed releases with newer kernel versions.
Hmm. So AMD announced to no longer support Sea Islands GPUs with newer fglrx drivers? I wasn't aware of that, but I haven't seen a new driver since Dec 2015 anyway. Thanks, Stefan Public Key available ------------------------------------------------------ Stefan Dirsch (Res. & Dev.) SUSE LINUX GmbH Tel: 0911-740 53 0 Maxfeldstraße 5 FAX: 0911-740 53 479 D-90409 Nürnberg http://www.suse.de Germany --------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE Linux GmbH, GF: Felix Imendörffer, Jane Smithard, Graham Norton, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) --------------------------------------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org