AMD Radeon RX Vega (various) GPU cards on classic *BSD?

[dchmelik]

I'm aware classic *BSD mostly/all somehow imports some Linux drivers into a framework allowing them to be used with *BSD kernels. I'm trying to use an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (the Vega series is over a year old now) but wondering when it'd have full support sort of like AMDGPU-PRO (available for Redhat/RHEL/CentOS, SUSE/SLED/SLES, Ubuntu GNU/Linuxes)... meaning letting you compute with the GPU, not just use for 2D (or 3D, which is not so necessary for me.) What I heard on freenode IRC is that classic *BSD need a new Mesa so they can enable OpenCL. I looked at the Mesa website and it says it now supports the chip family name a.k.a. the Vega ones. How long would you say it might be until any stable NetBSD, FreeBSD/TrueOS, or OpenBSD might have this sort of support you could use OpenCL? I like to use it (forced to use a different OS on that PC, but I have a few PCs on my desktop) like for UC Berkeley's Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) to support science and even get paid Gridcoin (GRC) doing that, but I'd like to eventually use OpenCL for such things on classic *BSD... most likely FreeBSD, or even TrueOS if I can set to boot to command-line rather than X (lately I just think graphical installers are occasionally nice.)

[shep]

This misc@openbsd.org post is enlightening:
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152465462030464&w=2

The bottom line (both figuratively and literally)

I have no plans regarding amdgpu.

Most people seem to be interested from the point of view of polaris/vega
which are not supported in linux 4.4. Ignoring the parts of the shared
drm/ttm code that would have to be updated the latest
drivers/gpu/drm/amd in linux has over 1.5 million lines of code. Which
is multiple times larger than the complete OpenBSD kernel source...

It may appear earlier in FreeBSD or NetBSD but Xorg is part of the base OpenBSD code and nothing goes into base until audited for security. No project volunteer is jumping up n down for the opportunity to audit 1.5M lines of code.

[LeFrettchen]

Originally Posted by shep

No project volunteer is jumping up n down for the opportunity to audit 1.5M lines of code.

Weird !

[dchmelik]

Originally Posted by shep

No project volunteer is jumping up n down for the opportunity to audit 1.5M lines of code.

I can understand that. Mostly I used NetBSD & FreeBSD for desktop/workstation and OpenBSD for servers, but it's nice if OpenBSD still has KDE3. I got used to rolling updates and power/speed sounds nice, so I was leaning to FreeBSD for that desktop PC later. But maybe even for their (biggest?) project, 1.5 million lines is excessive, at least for a time...

[dchmelik]

Apparently the required Mesa (18.3) is out, so if prerequisite drivers were ported from Linux, OpenCL should also be possible.

Of course, I know OpenBSD would have to audit every 1.4 million lines carefully. Is it about the same with NetBSD & FreeBSD?

[shep]

My bet would be that Vega graphics will show up in FreeBSD first.

There is already support for some GCN based cards


https://www.freshports.org/graphics/drm-next-kmod

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/hea...77&view=markup

It is having some growing pains

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/a...1/#post-406585

[dchmelik]

Originally Posted by shep

There is already support for some GCN based cards

There are so many code-/category-/number-names for cards I'm confused. How do I know if that means my card is supported yet (even if there may be a few problems?)

[fvgit]

Originally Posted by dchmelik

Apparently the required Mesa (18.3) is out, so if prerequisite drivers were ported from Linux, OpenCL should also be possible.?

There was some talk about that on reddit not long ago. The gist of it was that besides the updated radeondrm in 6.4 a libLLVM enabled Mesa is required to support acceleration on GCN cards. But due to the way clang is compiled in base, libLLVM is not currently built and only availble in ports. Supposedly this is being worked on but will take time. Even though Mesa was updated in -current, the libLLVM thing needs to be solved.

[Sehnsucht94]

FreeBSD drm caught up with Linux 4.11 some months ago, and as shep mentioned,it does include amdgpu, but obviously support goes as far as Polaris, no Vega unfortunately . I think Linux' added Vega support in 4.15, which means the next major update has good chances of supporting it. However, the problem is that I don't see it happening any time soon,considering the frequency which the FreeBSD drm gets significant changes (once every 2 years or so)

[shep]

There are so many code-/category-/number-names for cards I'm confused. How do I know if that means my card is supported yet (even if there may be a few problems?)

The nomenclature is a mess and there is some overlap with Terrascale/GCN my APU will run the older Terrascale radeon drivers or the GCN-1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Core_Next

[dchmelik]

These AMDGPU cards are now at least working for display drivers (multiple monitors) which is good enough for me in the warmer weather. Still following this thread especially if there are any reports these work for OpenCL.