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4 months ago
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It has no acute impact on the vast majority of Linux users, but politically it is the culmination of an open source strategy adopted in 2007: AMD is now also abandoning proprietary 3D drivers in its Linux driver package for enterprise customers; instead, the company will in future supply the drivers that Linux distributions have been setting up as standard for Radeon graphics processors for years.
Three Vulkan drivers for AMD GPUs so far
For Linux users, the step is nevertheless a gain, as AMD will in future rely on the "Radv" driver for the Vulkan 3D programming interface. This is part of the Mesa graphics library and driver collection and uses parts of the infrastructure also used by other Mesa drivers. Developers from companies such as Red Hat, Google and Valve in particular launched it years ago independently of AMD and have been pushing it ever since, although AMD already offered an open-source and standalone Vulkan driver called "Amdvlk". AMD's proprietary Vulkan drivers for Windows and Linux are based on the latter; the one for Linux is called "Vulkan-Amdgpu-Pro" and will soon be history due to the change of direction. AMD did not respond to a question about the future of "Amdvlk" posed at the end of May.
Instead of putting work into two Vulkan drivers that are insignificant for most Linux users, AMD is likely to become more involved in the development of "Radv" in the future with bug fixes, optimizations and other improvements, after AMD had largely ignored it for years. This should further improve the quality of the Radv driver, which has been working much better and with better performance for some time now. It was a similar case with the open source OpenGL driver "radeonsi", which is also included in Mesa: This driver, which is installed by default in common Linux distributions, has long been driven by AMD developers, who have massively improved the 3D performance of the driver and the underlying Mesa components over the years. Drivers for GPUs from other manufacturers have also benefited from this.
An OpenGL driver is also being sidelined
AMD has been supplying the Radeonsi driver for the older 3D programming interface OpenGL in its driver package for enterprise customers for some time; at the same time, however, there was also a proprietary OpenGL driver to choose from, which is related to AMD's OpenGL driver for Windows. AMD is now also abandoning this.
AMD announced the change in the two 3D drivers in the release notes for "Radeon Software for Linux 25.10.2"; the switch is to take place in version 25.20 of the driver collection, which is expected to be released in a few months' time and is aimed at corporate customers and workstations. This only supports common distributions on the market such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu's LTS versions; for other Linux-based operating systems such as Arch Linux, Fedora or Linux Mint, AMD has long recommended using the drivers supplied with them.
AMD wants to give up three drivers with version 25.20 of its Linux driver package.
(Image: Screenshot / Thorsten Leemhuis)
AMD also announced a changing of the guard for version 25.20 of the video acceleration drivers: The company is giving up the one for AMD's AMF (Advanced Media Framework) programming interface in order to supply one for the VA-API (Video Acceleration API) instead. Specifically, this is one that AMD has been promoting together with the open source community for some time as part of Mesa. As more Linux applications master the VA-API, the change can be advantageous for many users. In some cases, however, it can also be a step backwards –, for example with the Linux, MacOS and Windows-supported video transcoder HandBrake, which supports AMF but not the VA-API. All kinds of users have been complaining about this for years.
For the underlying kernel driver, AMD continues to rely on drivers derived from those contained in the Linux kernel, such as "Amdgpu", in its driver package for enterprise customers. Ultimately, AMD's driver package will use exactly the same drivers that common Linux distributions install. This means that open source has finally become fully established in the enterprise market for AMD. Almost 18 years after the company announced a change in strategy towards open source drivers in September 2007.
(olb)
