#amdvlk

AMDVLK 2024.Q2.2

Драйвер AMDVLK 2024.Q2.2 исправляет ошибки.

Выпущен AMDVLK 2024.Q1.3 с исправлениями

Сегодня компания AMD выпустила третье и последнее в этом квартале обновление драйвера Vulkan с открытым исходным кодом.

AMDVLK 2024.Q1.1

AMDVLK 2024.Q1.1 стал первым в новом году релизом драйвера AMD с открытым исходным кодом Vulkan API для графики Radeon в Linux и он приносит Gang Submit, более быструю компиляцию конвейера Ray-Tracing.

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to my ongoing saga of fighting with Linux to get it to do things.  Now I admit my i7 desktop works quite amazingly but this Xeon W3550 is fighting me at every step.

In my previous episodes I explained how I had to use the Linux-ck kernel to get my Broadcom Archer T9E Wi-Fi card working.  Well I decided to try out Lutris see if I could get some games working it was here that I ran into problems.

Now I am not a huge games player but occasionally I like to play the odd game of things.  Now Steam is working quite well with the Xeon however I do occasionally play games that are not fully Linux converted using things like Lutris and Proton.

Now I know I have the Xeon running a dual boot system so if I want to play games I can just load into Windows 10 however as I spend most of my time in Linux nowadays.  Sometimes I just can’t be bothered to wait for the restart and then Windows 10 to load which is slow as hell as this machine doesn’t have an SSD in it.

So if I can get a few games to work it just saves me a lot of faffing about.  Especially as the Xeon seems to take forever to restart.  The BIOS seems incredibly slow and that is even updated to the latest version available for the Z400 of version 3.60.

Anyway I digress using EndeavourOS I noticed it was using the Radeon driver so Vulkan would not work.  I switched up to the AMDGPU-Pro drivers by installing the DKMS modules.

Sure enough I could get VKcube to run but it kept complaining that RADV is not a conformant vulkan implementation.  Now this is the version of the Vulkan driver run by MESA which in turn is used by things like DXVK so Vulkan was not being used by Lutris and Wine.

A bit of an internet search later I discovered that AMD have their own driver called AMDVLK and after a long compile the actual Vulkan drivers now work.

It also turns out I made a mistake the graphics card in the Xeon it the AMD Radeon R9 290X not the 370X which I mentioned before.  I was given it by a friend so it’s my own fault for not checking.

I put it down to heat for this brain fart moment.  The only issue with the R9 290X is that OpenCL is version 1.2 and most programs that use OpenCL need version 2 or higher. So I am not sure if something like Davinci Resolve would work with it.

I actually did try to get Davinci Resolve to work but it refused to see and Open CL drivers.  I had a similar experience on my i7 when using certain drivers using the Nvidia 710.  So I won’t be using Davinci.

Speaking of using the i7 desktop brings me on to my next topic of thing.  I have been playing with.  As if anyone who has read more than one episode of this will know I like playing with emulators.

Well I discovered that MAME since 0.207 has now got a very basic emulation of the SGI Indigo.  Now it was a machine I never got to mess around with so I have always wanted to see what the fascination was about.

The version I had 0.212 so I set about downloading IRIX 5.3 and also got some of the IRIX 6.2.22 ones as well.

So I tried following a guide on the internet but every time I started the machine I could get the IP address reset but I could not get the CDROM to install.

At first I thought this was me being a pillock which would not be the first time I have missed something.  However no matter what I did I could not get the system to see the ISO as a CDROM.

After several failed attempts I threw in the towel.  I was frustrated.  I asked if there was a problem on the Mamedev Twitter account.

After a day of so I was replied to that the CDROM setup in the emulation had been messed up by the guy maintaining it and the code was being reverted in 0.213.

Sure enough a few days later 0.213 was released and after a failed attempt by me using the wrong Indy ROM (I was using indy_4613) I finally used the right ROM (indy_4610) and finally I got the Irix 5.3 software installed.

Now it runs like a snail at the moment and even on my i7 3770k with 32GB of RAM it only achieves running at 15% of the SGI Indigo speed.  However the fact that someone has it even working at some degree is more than most do.

Qemu only has userland privilege which also you to run certain programs but not the full OS.  MAME has got the full OS running, admittedly slowly at the minute which means it's not exceptionally usable at the moment.

But it's a step in the right direction.  Given MAME updates regularly eventually they will manage to get it running at a reasonable speed.  My respect to them and I will keep an eye out on it over the next few releases of MAME.

I can now upgrade to 6.2.30 if I felt up to it but it would run the speed of an asthmatic snail.  To be honest at the moment I am just amazed they have got as far as they have in the small amount of versions they have.