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Comment by anotherhue | Hacker News Reader

AMD's GPU drivers are already in the mainline kernel. We shouldn't loose sight of what a victory this is.

Imagine any other core component of modern systems requiring such extensive, closed source binary blobs?

The APU combos are particularly compelling for desktop Linux.

For game's yes but for Blender 3D's GPU accelerated Cycles rendering(Not CPU Cycles rendering) that relies on OpenCL that's not shipping in the Kernel.

So on some of the later HWE Kernels 5.8 for me that's not so good just yet for getting OpenCL working on AMD's Ryzen/Vega integrated graphics(Ryzen 5 3550H) and Radeon RX560X discrete mobile Graphics as well on the same laptop.

So Blender 3D currently on my laptop can not detect any OpenCL/Cycles compatible rendering enabled Graphics/GPU and will default to Cycles rendering on the CPU cores instead(Way Slower and ties the CPU cores/threads up 100% until the CPU rendering is finished).

So the MESA OpenGL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape but really any OpenCL compute acceleration on AMD's Ryzen APUs and on Kernel 5.8/Later and that's a wait and see. And Blender 3D, Gimp, Dark Table and other open source Graphics applications that need OpenCL will have to wait for that for me.

So Compelling for gaming maybe yes but compelling for GPGPU compute workloads that rely on OpenCL not so much compelling on the newer Razen APU based hardware and AMD's Instructions and not as polished as some of the Intel/Linux related instructions.

But really most laptop OEMs are still not tuning their laptops firmware for Linux except system76/other linux laptop OEMs! But that ASUS TUF FX505DY laptop was on special sale pre pandemic for $499 so not a bad deal but with loads of special issues to surmount just to get a Linux Mint 20.0 Live USB to even boot to install Mint 20 in a dual boot configuration alongside Windows 10 10/1909 Home.

But Blobs and out of tree Wifi drivers and that laptop's getting a Samsung M.2/NVMe to replace the WD Black M.2/NVMe that shipped with the laptop and the Realtek WiFi card sits right under the M.2/NVMe SSD slot so that's getting a more Linux Kernel out of the Box friendly WiFi card with better features as well.

> most laptop OEMs are still not tuning their laptops firmware for Linux

Just curious, what would they actually change in the firmware to "tune a laptop for Linux"?

Just checking that ACPI works correctly would already be great. It took my current laptop almost a year of having to disable ACPI completely before fixes&workarounds were implemented in-kernel.

You need to install opencl-mesa and rock-dkms and should work. clinfo will then show OpenCL devices.

I have no clue why this is not included in distros by default though.

This package might be called mesa-opencl-icd

The problem is that mesa's "Clover" OpenCL driver currently only supports OpenCL 1.1 and does not support OpenCL images and was abandoned for years. This makes it more or less useless. Additionally, these code paths are not very well tested or optimized.

This has been in the works recently though, I've seen PRs for OpenCL 3.0 and OpenCL Image, not sure if they're in yet. With both Redhat and Microsoft being interested in working on this area now, I expect to see improvements soon.

How is OpenCL still a thing? No version beyond 1.2 gained wide adoption, compute shaders can do almost everything 1.2 can do, and the recent 3.0 version simply rolled back all changes since 1.2 by making them optional. It's a seriously dead horse at this point.

GPU drivers are made up of two parts:

- the kernel driver (AMDGPU) - the user space driver (Mesa, AMDVLK, AMDGPU-PRO)

The lack of CL support has nothing to do with the kernel driver, that's something that gets implemented in the user space driver.

That's huge and a big reason why my next GPU will be from AMD. If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers, ...it is terrible out there. You can be on a stock watcher Discord and click instantly to still see that it is sold out (and at a huge markup too).

For what it's worth, Lisa Su said that although AMD had underestimated demand, the tightness should ease up by the second half of this year.

I'm sure it'll eventually ease up (there's always a crunch with new GPUs and consoles, plus all the factors of 2020/21), but I don't take AMD's word for much as their early PR on launch availability was hardly good. This was after what we saw happen for Nvidia's launch too.

Anyway, there's blame to go around, and these days I'm more inclined to look at how poorly retailers handle it. There are few (or none) backorders or queuing, and sometimes easily gamed systems. Either way they get their money, but it's not a good look. (It is not the end of the world, but annoying and doubly so when so many of us are stuck inside. Certainly much worse problems to have, I know.)

A fairly significant amount of the "easily gamed systems" are actually taking reasonable precautions. Several of the people doing the gaming are escalating it to very stupid heights: dozens of LLCs registered, applied for ASNs, used to hijack large amounts of IP space and hijack Comcast/Verizon/etc IP space to place fraudulent orders.

There is a huge amount of CFAA or worse stuff that needs prosecuting - it isn't just bots placing orders, it's mass amounts of hacked machines and hacked phones being used as proxies and cookies stolen for a valid fingerprint/less CAPTCHAs, wire fraud and forgery of documentation being accepted (instead of RPKI/proper filtering)

Anyone that has a slightly popular (at all, really) will get shady requests asking to "install a SDK" or "buy your extension" which installs malware on your end-users devices. This is the slightly legal/grey area part. The other part is where AFRINIC recently revoked a /14 for fraud that was nearly entirely used for proxies and abuse by a 1 person US company, based on WHOIS remarks, obtained fraudulently.

Sure, there will always be people out to make a (not so quick?) buck. Having sufficient supply, and thus not being able to scalp for profit, would help. But something as simple as backorders and a queue would help too, as that would tamper demand and need to go to resellers. I think it is utterly absurd that in looking for a new AMD card in the US, there's nowhere I can order and just wait. (One exception I found was Provantage, back from the ol' mail catalog days. I have an order with them but the product has since been removed from the website. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe one day.)

The people that do this are using queues - by registering hundreds of thousands of accounts from compromised proxies and signing up for the Newegg raffle on all of them, and queuing up for every possible product on all of them. Some sell sets of cookies that you load into your browser after carting, or they check out for you.

Second half of 2021 is rather unsatisfying, although I understand why. Ultimately if this generation isn't going to be available in quantity until nearly 7 months post-release, I don't see much reason why I shouldn't just skip this generation entirely.

This may be a good idea. Wouldn't this delayed release of the current generation give the engineers additional time to improve and iterate on the following generation before release?

I personally see no reason to believe the next generation isn’t going to suffer from similar supply issues. As I understand it there just isn’t extra bandwidth at the manufacturers, it’s less that AMD and Nvidia underestimated demand and more that they couldn’t have gotten more throughout at a reasonable price point. Presumably at some point more factories will start up to close the gap, but (again as I understand it) between COVID slowdown and how difficult modern computer manufacturing is extra throughput could be a few years off.

> If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers

My advice, assuming you're on HN with a technical background, is to create your own bot for monitoring product availability on your store of choice. It's a pretty small investment of time, and it frees you up from the time spent watching a Discord or refreshing store pages manually. Set it up to poll at a reasonable frequency, set up some form of push notification, and find that it's not that hard to get ahead of the horde who are all relying on someone else to do the dirty work for them.

Signed,

Someone who got a launch day 3090 from the Nvidia store

I'm not dismissing your idea, but the fact you managed to purchase a 3090 on launch day seems more like survivorship bias than anything else.

You have a good point, because I did fail to get a 3080, but I didn't start automating until after the initial 3080 launch.

On the other hand, I did get a 1080ti several months after launch during the crypto-boom of 2017 using the same approach. I have also stumbled upon lots of "we added more tickets to X event" type situations before they are announced on social media and disappear in an instant (think sold out music festivals and concerts).

What would you consider a reasonable frequency?

Once per minute when you're close to an expected release of product, once per 3-5 minutes when you don't have a great reason to believe that inventory will be added.

My goal is just to mimic me sitting at my laptop refreshing a page trying to buy something as soon as it becomes available, so that I can use my time for something better.

Don't you also need to evade IP blocking for pinging their page every minute (or whatever interval)? And either way, right now no sanely priced 6800 series cards are being stocked anyway, from what I've seen. I'm not paying $1,000+ for a card where the AMD stock version is $650.

When I was hunting the 3090, in general I polled every 5 minutes (with some variability to look more natural). When the "official" release time came closer, I brought it down to something like 1-3 minutes. I never ran into problems with IP blocking.

Trust me, there are people sitting there refreshing the page more often than 1x per minute, and as far as I know they didn't run into any blocks either.

Hmm, good to know, thanks. I enjoy setting up little services and playing around, so maybe I'll give it a go. Still, for the 6800xt at least, stock is barely existent and is at huge markups (or tends to be the more expensive versions in 3rd parties' lineups). Gonna be a while...

Something I don't get, both in case of Nvidia and PS5 products, is why they don't open the sales with higher prices. They are basically leaving at least 2x the money on the table to scalpers.

Interesting question.

I believe nVidia once had a policy of deliberately crippling the double-precision performance of their regular consumer graphics cards, in an effort to push their high-end computation-friendly 'workstation' cards, but that's not quite the same thing.

Not a rock-solid source, but: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64....

Right, why not just conduct auctions?

Personally I've always wished they'd just do backordering, especially with the PS5. Pre-orders sold out? That's fine just let me get in a queue instead of having to check back constantly and try to race for one. I think that alone would kill the scalper market.

I don't think it would, people would still be willing to pay more to cut the line.

Probably some, but I'm not sure it'd be enough to maintain a market. All my friends I game with seem to think they'd prefer just being able to back-order to the current system, and clearly basing market predictions based on myself and my friend group couldn't be wrong :-).

Hey, I would prefer back ordering too. Looks like your model is confirmed 100% accurate.

I would jump of joy, if I wasn't sour with open source drivers dropping support for the AMD E-350 APU shipped on the 1215B netbook.

Closed source blob, OpenGL 4.1 with video hardware acceleration.

Open source drivers, OpenGL 3.3 with a kind of working video hardware acceleration.

Windows drivers, still OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11.

So much for the benefit of open source drivers.

Are you sure? According to arch docs, it should be openGL 4.3 or 4.5 when using mesa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin... (if I'm not mistaken the GPU architecture is TeraScale 2)

I am as sure as xglinfo is.

I too have an Evergreen GPU that supports OpenGL 4.5 in hardware (and on Windows with AMD's proprietary drivers) but only 3.3 on Linux with Mesa.

This kind of thing usually tends to be some sort of configuration error. Rare these days, but not entirely unheard of, and more likely if you build drivers from source.

I don't build drivers from source.

If it is a configuration error, Canonical has been making the error since it decided to replace fxgl drivers.

Yes - but for proper hardware support you often need to compile the latest Mesa-git. That's not super user friendly yet, but I expect it will get better down the road.

Is this true on rolling releases like Manjaro or Arch? If you get the latest Mesa packages regularly, new GPU support seems pretty robust.

(Windows 10, where you can expect the latest hardware to work, is closer to a rolling Linux distro in that way. Meanwhile, point-release distros like Ubuntu seem more fit for purpose as server, not end-user, distros.)

Yes even on Arch, it's recommended to use the AUR to get Mesa-git, especially when a new GPU card comes out.

6800 is already working fine on release mesa for me. Mightn't have been the case if stock wasn't buggered and I'd have gotten my hands on it a couple of months ago at launch, mind.

I think that only tends to be the case with the newest hardware? Even 3 years ago when I finally made the switched from nvidia to an rx580 things just worked out of the box with stable Mesa and kernel versions.

Yes mostly for new hardware

I've had the RX 5700 XT since launch and only had to use mesa-git on the first couple of months, which is reasonable imo.

Yeah, I got the 5700 XT in December for a new build with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU. Everything works out of the box in Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS). And not just that, but I can run a host of Windows games from Steam using Proton without as much as a single tweak. GTA V ran out of the box, something I never manager to do with my previous build (Nvidia GPU with an Intel i5).

I'm a convert.

The driver situation is alright now, but don't buy a new AMD card expecting the experience to be this good. The first few months with this card were absolute hell for me, and I still have the occasional issue where the driver simply crashes and the machine reboots.

>Imagine any other core component of modern systems requiring such extensive, closed source binary blobs?

Isn't there actually a worrying amount that do? Wifi for instance.

just recently switched to an AMD card for this reason. well, that, and because I wanted to emulate mac os for safari testing

How did it go?

You might already be aware of this, but a less annoying way to test Safari compatibility is by using Epiphany (aka 'Web') as a substitute, since it's also based on Webkit. I've solved several Safari bugs that way.

It went okay, the install was a little messy, I had to restart the VM a couple of times when it hung, but I got it t work in the end, and the actual system itself is pretty stable. I used this project:

https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM

Thanks for the tip in regards to Epiphany, I am aware, but it doesn't help with testing stuff like ITP unfortunately.

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