Re: Have GPGPU support in guix?

[Jonathan Brielmaier <jonathan.brielmaier@web.de>]

On 04/26/2018 05:18 AM, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> 
> Joshua Branson <jbranso@fastmail.com> writes:
> 
>> That's actually a really good point.  I forgot about that.  Isn't radeon
>> close to having free drivers?
> 
> I thought it was entirely free already, isn't it?
> To my understanding, it's AMDGPU that is partly proprietary.
> According to the latest Phoronix benchmarks, the free Radeon performs
> really well.

There is a bunch of entirely FOSS drivers for AMD Radeon cards:

Kernel drivers:
radeon: for older cards before GCN1.2 (kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/radeon)
amdgpu: for the new cards since GCN1.2 (kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu)

Userspace drivers:
radeonsi: for almost all cards in the last decade (mesa/src/gallium/drivers/radeonsi)
r600: for the ones before (mesa/src/gallium/drivers/r600)

Vulkan drivers:
RADV: written by the community (RedHat etc.), because AMD initially didn't make their Vulkan
userspace FOSS (mesa/src/amd/vulkan)
AMDVLK: AMDs Vulkan driver released as FOSS (https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK)

So your FOSS driver would consist of amdgpu + radeonsi + radv and is in almost all cases the
best choice (performance, stability etc).

Then there was always a propriatary driver by AMD nowadays it's called "Radeon Software for Linux",
which bundles also free software like AMDVLK and ROCm. Other names before were "AMDGPU-PRO", 
"AMD Catalyst" and "fglrx"...

I hope it's now less confusing then before :P
Jonathan