Because it's large and large is difficult to maintain.
AMD maintains it but do we know how they are generated? Probably not.
It's like a gift that stinks but you can't complain about because it's a gift.
AMD maintains it but do we know how they are generated? Probably not.
It's like a gift that stinks but you can't complain about because it's a gift.
Having worked in the semi industry, I can fathom a guess: It's a spaghetti mess of cascading Perl scripts that parse the Verilog/VHDL design files, with their development going back 20+ years, full of comments like "don't touch this line because it breaks another line, nobody knows why", and maintained by a team where a gray-beard "Gandalf" engineer wearing an ATI t-shirt, has most of the deep-down low-level knowledge on how to un-fuck them whenever they get fucked, pardon my french.
Curious how much of AMD Radeon GPU development now is being done in Markham-Canada, as AFAIK, the modern Radeon architecture stems from ATI's acquisition of ArtX[1], a US-based spin-ff of SGI, which was responsible for the GPUs in the Nintendo GameCube, Wii and many other innovations like programable shaders, later found in ATI/AMD GPUs.
>Much of that team is European now though from what I hear, and they’re generally a good bunch.
I didn't know AMD has a GPU design team in Europe. Where? I know they had a fab in Germany and they have an office for the Ryzen and Infinity Fabric R&D in Romania, but I had no idea they do GPU stuff as well in Europe. Where is that office?
AFAIK they don't, but the Linux driver guys seem to be mostly German and Polish and such. And yeah, they are doing good work. I half-expect AMD to reboot their Windows driver from the Linux driver code base at some point.
Basically those files are generated from AMD GPU register data files where majorify of registers are documented, but there of course bunch of magic numbers as well probably because they belong to HDCP or other cases where documentation only available under NDA.
There been a number of leaks of AMD internal documentation so anyone who is into GPU drivers can really find a lot of information on their GPU internal workings.
I've archieved some of it many years ago and it's was never DMCA*ed:
https://github.com/ArseniyShestakov/rai-bonaire
Source was a talk on CCC.