OH SHIT!
Most exciting from this is that the Mesa Vulkan driver RADV will be officially supported.
YOOOOOOOOOO
This is a huge win for the open source community!!🥳🎊🎊🎊
Relevant and recent MESA drivers news:
That is a big deal. RadeonSI has always had official support but for some reason AMD has been ignoring RADV in favor of their own stuff. Glad to see they're shifting to mesa for literally everything other than compute.
As far as I'm aware, the RadeonSI driver was built internally, whilst RADV was an external effort.
The focus was on AMDVLK as it's similar in design to the XGL windows vulkan driver
RADV was an external effort.
Not only external but a fork of Intel's Vulkan driver. That's why Intel's copyright is mentioned in many file headers.
The windows vulkan driver is called XGL? That's not confusing lol
Yup, derived from a point in time where Vulkan was seen as a direct successor to OpenGL.
I suppose credit where due, AMD did kind of put an end to mantle, and give that over to the Khronos group to later become Vulkan. XGL as the UMD reference may predate the name Vulkan altogether.
Yeah, at one point vulkan was called glNext so I guess it isn't that wild. Although I'm surprised they would have started development on a driver before any spec was fully agreed on. Unless they just reworked their mantle driver to become their vulkan driver?
I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was the case. Could have been that the successive work was negotiated with khronos & lunarg before the final name was chosen.
This is a huge win for the open source community!!
The headline alone? No, I don't think so, because AMD's driver had a reputation for working in some situations (mostly non-gaming IIRC) where Mesa didn't.
However, this bit quoted from the release notes might make up for it:
"The Mesa Vulkan driver will be officially supported, along with Mesa OpenGL and Multimedia support."
Assuming they mean that AMD will work with Mesa to get the remaining edge cases fixed, so that the proprietary driver is no longer needed at all, this does seem like good news.
I didn't even realize there was such a thing...
When using a very recent AMD discrete GPU that is not yet well supported by recent versions of Linux distributions, AMD recommends the most recent release of Radeon™ Software for Linux®.
What a confusing way to put it, I thought I had some deep misunderstanding about Radeon's relation with AMD at first.
Huh...
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