Don't want to see articles from a certain category? When logged in, go to your User Settings and adjust your feed in the Content Preferences section where you can block tags!
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

AMD have now officially open-sourced their 'AMDVLK' Linux Vulkan driver

By - | Views: 17,365

Typical really, the day after I do a review of 2017 and mention how AMD announced they would finally release it, but still didn't, they then go and do it today. The 'AMDVLK' is now officially under the MIT license!

The announcement I saw came courtesy of Matthäus G. Chajdas from AMD on Twitter, which was retweeted by another developer I follow to end up in my timeline.

The curious thing now, is what will happen in the open source driver space for AMD GPUs. Since the Mesa RADV driver has come a long way, it will be interesting to see what happens between the two efforts. It is entirely seperate to Mesa, with it being built to work with AMD's Platform Abstraction Library (PAL). That's the awesome thing, their PAL is also now open source under the MIT license.

Since it confused me at first: the xgl repository has the Vulkan implementation that sits on top of the PAL code. The actual AMDVLK repository is information about it all.

AMD have listed support for these GPUs:

  • Radeon™ HD 7000 Series
  • Radeon™ HD 8000M Series
  • Radeon™ R5/R7/R9 200/300 Series
  • Radeon™ RX 400/500 Series
  • Radeon™ M200/M300/M400 Series
  • Radeon™ RX Vega Series
  • AMD FirePro™ Workstation Wx000/Wx100/Wx300 Series
  • Radeon™ Pro WX x100 Series
  • Radeon™ Pro 400/500 Series

AMD are only listing support for Ubuntu 16.04.3 and RedHat 7.4 right now, but hopefully now it's fully open work can be done to enable good support for a wider selection of distributions.

It sure took them a while, but with open source releases they do end up having to go through legal hoops to ensure there's nothing in the code that they're not actually allowed to open source. There's probably plenty of other checks it has to go through too, but it is fantastic that AMD have done this.

You can see the full repository on GitHub here. For some extra background info, see this article on the gpuopen website.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
17 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
17 comments
Page: «2/2
  Go to:

Kimyrielle Dec 22, 2017
Would be awesome to see AMD becoming a real alternative to NVidia again. I certainly like their way to handle the community better than NVidia's...
Shmerl Dec 22, 2017
Quoting: KimyrielleWould be awesome to see AMD becoming a real alternative to NVidia again. I certainly like their way to handle the community better than NVidia's...

Drivers wise it's already a great alternative. Now they need to catch up on hardware. Vega is not very competitive on power consumption.
14 Dec 22, 2017
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: KimyrielleWould be awesome to see AMD becoming a real alternative to NVidia again. I certainly like their way to handle the community better than NVidia's...

Drivers wise it's already a great alternative. Now they need to catch up on hardware. Vega is not very competitive on power consumption.
I'm very interested in going AMD for either/both CPU and/or GPU on my next overhaul.
TheRiddick Dec 23, 2017
Quoting: KimyrielleWould be awesome to see AMD becoming a real alternative to NVidia again. I certainly like their way to handle the community better than NVidia's...

Not until they release a 1080ti competitor under 300tdp. I mention the TDP because its quite important for ITX and temperature control, preferably with 7nm we should get significantly lower power demand and a 1080ti competitor.

A 1080TI has become the baseline for VR gaming AND 4k gaming, I'm in allot of pain with my FuryX but just don't have 1k laying around to spend on a Ti atm :(
Shmerl Dec 24, 2017
Quoting: TheRiddickpreferably with 7nm we should get significantly lower power demand and a 1080ti competitor.

7 nm Vega refresh is supposed to happen in H1 2018, so I'm waiting for Sapphire to make something sensible with it, and not that 3 8-pin power connectors monster.
slaapliedje Dec 28, 2017
Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: TheRiddickpreferably with 7nm we should get significantly lower power demand and a 1080ti competitor.

7 nm Vega refresh is supposed to happen in H1 2018, so I'm waiting for Sapphire to make something sensible with it, and not that 3 8-pin power connectors monster.

Ha, I wonder if we'll ever hit that nice plateau of power, so we can finally start working toward power consumption. Personally I think the companies would serve customers better by doing a raw power version upon release of a new chip/family, then for their refresh, release a card as powerful, but that runs quieter/less power hungry. These should yield higher overclocks for those that tend to go that route anyhow.
Shmerl Dec 28, 2017
Actually correction, the refresh is going to be 12 nm. 7 nm will be used already in Navi, so that's in 2019.


Last edited by Shmerl on 28 December 2017 at 9:58 pm UTC
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.