AMD has updated their Linux Open Source Driver for Vulkan.

The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is an open-source Vulkan driver for Radeon graphics adapters on Linux. It is built on top of AMD's Platform Abstraction Library (PAL), a shared component that is designed to encapsulate certain hardware and OS-specific programming details for many of AMD's 3D and compute drivers. Leveraging PAL can help provide a consistent experience across platforms, including support for recently released GPUs and compatibility with AMD developer tools.

Shaders that compose a particular VkPipeline object are compiled as a single entity using the LLVM-Based Pipeline Compiler (LLPC) library. LLPC builds on LLVM's existing shader compilation infrastructure for AMD GPUs to generate code objects compatible with PAL's pipeline ABI. Notably, AMD's closed-source Vulkan driver currently uses a different pipeline compiler, which is the major difference between AMD's open-source and closed-source Vulkan drivers.

Product Support

The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is designed to support the following AMD GPUs:

Radeon HD 7000 Series
Radeon HD 8000M Series
Radeon R5/R7/R9 200/300 Series
Radeon RX 400/500 Series
Radeon M200/M300/M400 Series
Radeon RX Vega Series
Radeon RX 5700 Series
AMD FirePro Workstation Wx000/Wx100/Wx300 Series
Radeon Pro WX x100 Series
Radeon Pro 400/500 Series

Operating System Support

The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is designed to support following distros on both the AMDGPU upstream driver stack and the AMDGPU Pro driver stack:

Ubuntu 18.04 (64-bit version)
Ubuntu 16.04.4 (64-bit version)
RedHat 7.5 (64-bit version)
The driver has not been tested on other distros. You may try it out on other distros of your choice.

Note: To run the Vulkan driver with AMDGPU upstream driver stack on SI and CI generation GPUs, amdgpu.si_support and amdgpu.cik_support need to be enabled in kernel

2021-4-28 update

New feature and improvement

• Update Vulkan Headers to 1.2.174
• Support dynamic enable of color writes
• Add partial nested cmd buffer support to GpuDebug layer

Issue fix

• [AMDVLK issue #187] AMDVLK give out of memory errors when no AMD GPU installed
• [AMDVLK issue #204] DCC incorrectly enabled for certain format lists
• Few applications are running with llvmpipe driver by default with AMD switchable graphics layer

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