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AMD has updated their Linux Open Source Driver for Vulkan



The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan® is an open-source Vulkan driver for Radeon™ graphics adapters on Linux®. It is built on top of AMD's Platform Abstraction Library (PAL), a shared component that is designed to encapsulate certain hardware and OS-specific programming details for many of AMD's 3D and compute drivers. Leveraging PAL can help provide a consistent experience across platforms, including support for recently released GPUs and compatibility with AMD developer tools.

Shaders that compose a particular VkPipeline object are compiled as a single entity using the LLVM-Based Pipeline Compiler (LLPC) library. LLPC builds on LLVM's existing shader compilation infrastructure for AMD GPUs to generate code objects compatible with PAL's pipeline ABI. Notably, AMD's closed-source Vulkan driver currently uses a different pipeline compiler, which is the major difference between AMD's open-source and closed-source Vulkan drivers.

Product Support

The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is designed to support the following AMD 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
Radeon™ RX 5700 Series
AMD FirePro™ Workstation Wx000/Wx100/Wx300 Series
Radeon™ Pro WX x100 Series
Radeon™ Pro 400/500 Series

Operating System Support

The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is designed to support following distros on both the AMDGPU upstream driver stack and the AMDGPU Pro driver stack:

Ubuntu 18.04 (64-bit version)
Ubuntu 16.04.4 (64-bit version)
RedHat 7.5 (64-bit version)
The driver has not been tested on other distros. You may try it out on other distros of your choice.

Note: To run the Vulkan driver with AMDGPU upstream driver stack on SI and CI generation GPUs, amdgpu.si_support and amdgpu.cik_support need to be enabled in kernel

New feature and improvement

Support extension VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control
Update Vulkan headers to 1.1.116
Optimize atomic max/min
Optimize fp16 code generation
Various atomic optimizations
Extend atomic optimizer to gfx10

Issue fix

ICD initialization failure for system with a mix of GFX10 and other GFX versions ASICs
Crash with AMD GPU disabled
CTS dEQP-VK.binding_model.descriptorset_random.* - test failure
  AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan 2019.Q3.4 released