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AMD Publishes Open-Source Driver for GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In the Roadmap"

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Re: AMD Publishes Open-Source Driver for GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In the Roadmap"

#21

Post by pshirshov »

seanhunter wrote: post #5

It blows my mind how reliably AMD shoots itself in the foot. What we want isn’t that hard: 1) Support your graphics cards on linux using kernel drivers that you upstream. All of them. Not just a handful - all the ones you sell from say 18 months ago till today. 2) Make GPU acceleration actually work out of the box for pytorch and tensorflow. Not some special fork, patched version that you “maintain” on your website,…

> Support your graphics cards on linux using kernel drivers that you upstream. All of them. Not just a handful - all the ones you sell from say 18 months ago till today.

All the stuff works even if it's not officially supported. It's not that hard to set a single environment variable (HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION).

Like literally, everything works, from Vega 56/64 to ryzen 99xx iGPUs.

Also, try nixos. Everything literally works with a single config entry after recent merge of rocm 6.3. I successfully run a zoo of various radeons of different generations.

Re: AMD Publishes Open-Source Driver for GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In the Roadmap"

#23

Post by smerrill »

onli wrote: post #16
bayindirh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has two driver teams at this point. One of Linux/Open Source, one for Catalyst/Closed source, and they are not allowed to interact. Because, there are tons of IP and trade secrets involved in driver development and optimization. Sometimes game related, sometimes for patching a rogue application which developers can't or don't fix, etc. etc. GPU drivers are ought to be easy, but in reality, they are not. The open…

Fact of the matter is that I have a Radeon RX 6600, which I can't use with ollama. First, there is no ROCm at all in my distros repository - it doesn't compile reliably and needs too many ressources. Then, when compiling it manually, it turns out that ROCm doesn't even support the card in the first place. I'm aware that 8GB Vram are not enough for most such workloads. But no support at all? That's ridiculous. Let me…

You should be able to use ollama’s Vulkan backend and in my experience the speed will be the same. (I just spent a bunch of time putting Linux on my 2025 ASUS ROG Flow Z13 to use ROCm, only to see the exact same performance as Vulkan.)

Re: AMD Publishes Open-Source Driver for GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In the Roadmap"

#24

Post by mariusor »

spockz wrote: post #11
bayindirh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has two driver teams at this point. One of Linux/Open Source, one for Catalyst/Closed source, and they are not allowed to interact. Because, there are tons of IP and trade secrets involved in driver development and optimization. Sometimes game related, sometimes for patching a rogue application which developers can't or don't fix, etc. etc. GPU drivers are ought to be easy, but in reality, they are not. The open…

I accept that there are two teams for reasons that include IP. However, Nvidia must have the same problem and they appear not to be hamstrung by it. So what is the difference?

> Nvidia must have the same problem and they appear not to be hamstrung by it

Probably because they don't have an open-source driver for linux and they can focus on the proprietary one.

Re: AMD Publishes Open-Source Driver for GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In the Roadmap"

#25

Post by jeroenhd »

rwmj wrote: post #12
bayindirh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has two driver teams at this point. One of Linux/Open Source, one for Catalyst/Closed source, and they are not allowed to interact. Because, there are tons of IP and trade secrets involved in driver development and optimization. Sometimes game related, sometimes for patching a rogue application which developers can't or don't fix, etc. etc. GPU drivers are ought to be easy, but in reality, they are not. The open…

A laundry list of excuses ... or a list of things to work on. ("Why the hell do we have two driver teams?" - would be my #1 thing to fix if I was at AMD.)

The "fix" would be to make games perform like shit on Windows and disable HDR and other proprietary features, or to abolish the open Linux drivers. You can't have both, unless you do what Nvidia does and move all of the proprietary stuff to the GPU firmware and write a minimal driver to control that massive firmware blob. Which, obviously, would require reengineering the GPU hardware, which is expensive and of questionable value.

They can't open source their proprietary drivers even if they wanted to because they don't own all of the IP and their code is full of NDA'd trade secrets. AMD isn't paying two different teams to do the same work because they like wasting money.

Re: AMD Publishes Open-Source Driver for GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In the Roadmap"

#26

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

bavell wrote: post #19
seanhunter wrote: post #5

It blows my mind how reliably AMD shoots itself in the foot. What we want isn’t that hard: 1) Support your graphics cards on linux using kernel drivers that you upstream. All of them. Not just a handful - all the ones you sell from say 18 months ago till today. 2) Make GPU acceleration actually work out of the box for pytorch and tensorflow. Not some special fork, patched version that you “maintain” on your website,…

Sucks that you've had so much trouble... My experience with my cheap 6750XT is that it just works OOTB on Arch with rocm, llama.cpp, ollama, whisper, etc by setting an envvar.

Did you do any writeup/post on your experience with setting it up? I think it would have some audience ( apart from me that is ).

Re: AMD Publishes Open-Source Driver for GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In the Roadmap"

#27

Post by seanhunter »

pshirshov wrote: post #21
seanhunter wrote: post #5

It blows my mind how reliably AMD shoots itself in the foot. What we want isn’t that hard: 1) Support your graphics cards on linux using kernel drivers that you upstream. All of them. Not just a handful - all the ones you sell from say 18 months ago till today. 2) Make GPU acceleration actually work out of the box for pytorch and tensorflow. Not some special fork, patched version that you “maintain” on your website,…

> Support your graphics cards on linux using kernel drivers that you upstream. All of them. Not just a handful - all the ones you sell from say 18 months ago till today. All the stuff works even if it's not officially supported. It's not that hard to set a single environment variable (HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION). Like literally, everything works, from Vega 56/64 to ryzen 99xx iGPUs. Also, try nixos. Everything literall…

I’m using Nix and setting HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION. It’s not working on my GPU (Radeon RX7600)

Re: AMD Publishes Open-Source Driver for GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In the Roadmap"

#29

Post by mtillman »

transpute wrote: post #15
throwaway48476 wrote: post #9

If AMD does deliver on client dGPU virtualization it would be amazing.

Some old AMD workstation GPUs supported SR-IOV, that repo was just archived. https://open-iov.org/index.php/GPU_Support#AMD https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/MxGPU-Virtualiza... As "AI" use cases mature, NPU/AIE-ML virtualization will also be needed.

The pro vii (a wonderfully spec’d card for my purposes) had a bunch of awesome features-even remote access-but then they pulled the marketing pages from their website and stopped shipping the link bridge (non mpx) to water down the value of the card. I have no idea how AMD works.

Re: AMD Publishes Open-Source Driver for GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In the Roadmap"

#30

Post by nimish »

seanhunter wrote: post #5

It blows my mind how reliably AMD shoots itself in the foot. What we want isn’t that hard: 1) Support your graphics cards on linux using kernel drivers that you upstream. All of them. Not just a handful - all the ones you sell from say 18 months ago till today. 2) Make GPU acceleration actually work out of the box for pytorch and tensorflow. Not some special fork, patched version that you “maintain” on your website,…

AMD has never understood that software is important. It's not culturally baked into them.
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