AMD unified Linux open-source and closed-source drivers

AMD unified Linux open-source and closed-source drivers

AMD developers revealed at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year the new Linux driver model being developed: Linux drivers will still be divided into open-source drivers (Gallium3D) and closed-source drivers (catalysts ), however, the catalyst driver will be part of the driver and will be isolated in the user space, while the open-source driver located in the main branch of the kernel will be used by the catalyst.

Now, AMD developer Alex Deucher said at the XDC2014 conference that the unified Linux driver is moving forward. The new AMDGPU kernel driver will drive open-source and closed-Source graphics components, however, the new driver model will only apply to the next generation of amd gpu products. Open-source and closed-source drivers will use the same DRM library ioctl wrapper (libdrm) and DDX (X. org) driver, catalyst driver will be an independent user space blob, mainly processing OpenGL, OpenCL/compute and so on, it will communicate with open source stack.