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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"

#31

Post by wirybeige »

jeroenhd wrote: post #25
rwmj wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 questi…

AMD already has large firmware blobs. Both intel and nvidia have the software side of GPUs figured out.

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

#32

Post by bayindirh »

wirybeige wrote: post #31
jeroenhd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 questi…

AMD already has large firmware blobs. Both intel and nvidia have the software side of GPUs figured out.

NVIDIA's blobs are different when compared to others. They do not want to give away how their GPU clocking and enablement works. As a result, NVIDIA's blobs are both signed and picky about "who" they communicate with. You can't use the NVIDIA's full fledged firmware with nouveau for example.

On the other hand, the card enablement sequences are open for AMD and Intel. AMD only protects card's thermal and fan configuration data to preventing card damage, AFAIK. You can clock the card and use its power management features the way you like. For NVIDIA, even they are out of reach.

AMD's open drivers work way better than NVIDIA's closed ones, too. I have never seen how a single application refused to launch until I used NVIDIA closed drivers.

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

#33

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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…

> I'm aware that 8GB Vram are not enough for most such workloads. But no support at all? That's ridiculous. Let me use the card and fall back to system memory for all I care.

> Nvidia, as much as I hate their usually awfully insufficient linux support, has no such restrictions for any of their modern cards, as far as I'm aware.

In fact, I regularly run llamafile (and sometimes ollama) on an nvidia dGPU in a laptop, with 4GB of VRAM, and it works fine (ish... I mostly do the thing where some layers are on the GPU and some are CPU; it's still faster than pure CPU so whatever).

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

#35

Post by onli »

smerrill wrote: post #23
onli wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

That would mean switching to https://github.com/whyvl/ollama-vulkan? I see no backend selection in ollama, nor anything in the faq.

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

#37

Post by iforgotpassword »

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…

But why do you even have to do this fucking bullshit that you randomly stumble upon, while googling error message after error message, ending up in random github repos and issues?

And no, just because the three random cards you have work doesn't mean "everything works". Just tried an MI300A a few months ago... I just wanted to test ollama as this is one of the hottest applications for GPU acceleration now, it will surely be well supported right? First, the gfx version listed for it in the ollama docs is wrong - but OK, figured it out. Then Tried some random models with it, the only output it ever generates is GGGGGGGGGGGGG. Apparently only fp16 models work, nothing more quantized. So I pick one explicitly. Then it's slower than running on the cpu in the same system.

Thanks but no thanks; this cost me two days when Nvidia just works first try.

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

#38

Post by Nullabillity »

404human wrote: post #36

Anyone else find it funny that AMD releases new GPU features while people still can't get basic ML stuff working? It's like building a fancy garage before fixing the broken car.

Graphics work just fine. Y'know, the G in the name.

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

#39

Post by pjmlp »

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,…

Meanwhile NVidia has embraced Python as first class programming language on CUDA, with the new cuTile format, as companion to PTX.

And given the tooling they are adding full steam ahead for Python, I even wonder if Mojo will manage to get enough mindshare, let alone what AMD and Intel are not doing.

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

#40

Post by rbjorklin »

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.

This has been my experience with a 6950XT as well using Fedora.
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