Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

The amdgpu drivers in Linux are fantastic these days. Works out of the box with most hardware. No proprietary binaries needed, other than the firmware blobs. AMD is doing a really solid job of supporting their Linux user base.

View on HN

AMD drivers have an OS-independent hardware abstraction library at the core and they "only" have to adapt it to different systems: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/pal

So does nVidia.

Except the AMD driver is 1) open source and 2) works.

Exactly my point. The fact that nVidia also has an OS-independent abstraction library shouldn't stop them from making it work, at least.

No multi-GPU support (at least 2 years ago, using the binary drivers), no AMF support on Linux, and couldn't get multi-display support on a split screen. AMD is fail for me...

Yes, but does chromium play nice for acceleration ?

Seems to be. From about:gpu:

    Graphics Feature Status
    Canvas: Hardware accelerated
    Flash: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
    Compositing: Hardware accelerated
    Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
    Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Out-of-process Rasterization: Disabled
    Hardware Protected Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
    Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Skia Deferred Display List: Disabled
    Skia Renderer: Disabled
    Surface Control: Disabled
    Surface Synchronization: Enabled
    Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
    Viz Service Display Compositor: Disabled
    WebGL: Hardware accelerated
    WebGL2: Hardware accelerated

For rendering yes. For video decoding no. Chromium needs a patch to use VA-API[1].

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video...

Which laptops have AMD chips? I've looked casually, but only seen Nvidia.

Nvidia also does an excellent job of supporting linux. It's just not open source.

Excellent is a stretch. It works for things they support. Look at optimus and wayland for instance. Also, they restrict nouveau from working by signing blobs and enforcing checks. And this is years after Linus flipping the bird and other repeated requests.

Optimus was the single most pain in the ass thing I have ever experienced in linux. Never again, am I going to run linux on an optimus machine with Bumblebee.

Never again am I going to buy an Optimus machine.

EDIT: Wait, there's an open source thing? Is Bumblebee any good? Optimus is such a pain in my ass that it's making me want to smash this laptop.

They became famous on the net with this bug: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issue...

Well, there is that whole GBM/EGLstreams thing with Wayland. Also their supported architectures list is basically x86 these days.

Their driver is really behind in terms of supporting newer libdrm features. It's also not well integrated in the ecosystem. They basically don't talk to the other Linux graphics devs.

I don't know, I upgraded to 18.10 and my XPS's brightness control doesn't work. The Prime switchy thing can't change cards without a reboot, and if the screen goes to sleep between switching cards and rebooting, it never comes up again. Actually, with 18.10, it never comes up again anyway. I have a whole host of issues with nVidia cards, my next card is going to be AMD.

18.10 isn't even supported by Dell.

Awesome, a laptop with one-year OS support...

It's not even an LTS release.

Dell doesn't support non LTS (long term support) releases. The next LTS release of Ubuntu is 20.04.

What does this mean? What sort of support did I get from Dell for 18.04? I had to download and install everything myself.

That's not the point. The switching issue at least is present on 18.04 as well. Basically, ubuntu changed the mechnanism from bbswitch in 16.04 to a different one in 18.04. The 18.04 one is buggy and inferior at the moment.

Yeah, I spent an hour trying to get Bumblebee to work, to no avail. Alas.

Try Arch with the 4.20 kernel.

I might get angry enough to switch to Arch at some point, but I have too many Ubuntu-specific preferences and scripts to easily switch...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com