AMD and convergence between open and proprietary drivers for Linux

 

AMD and convergence between open and proprietary drivers for Linux

AMD talked about the future plans for hardware support in Linux, confirming that you want to unify the open source drivers with those owners.

AMD
After years of little interest to Linux, AMD has finally begun to improve support for the free operating system. The arrival of Valve's Steam client and a host of new ARM based precisely on Linux, have led to several improvements in hardware support from AMD.
Just this week AMD introduced several important projects for the future including support for Linux with the will to converge the existing open source driver (Gallium3D) with proprietary ones (Catalyst) which will be based on the same kernel driver named "AMDGPU ".

The new open source driver "AMDGPU" will be a new version of the current Radeon DRM driver, this will provide you with an excellent post-installation support already. The idea of ​​AMD is to provide the user with Linux, a system already performing, with support for hardware acceleration etc. already with the open source drivers for the user that will require greater graphics performance eg for play or for work in some applications such as Blender, etc. will then be available proprietary drivers Catalyst.

The convergence between open and proprietary AMD driver will not be immediate, however, the company's Sunnyvale has indicated that it has already started working on AMDGPU with graphics chips Sea Islands, and most likely will be supported only by future Radeon graphics cards next to the current R9 290 AMD also spoke also of the new Wayland graphical server, the company is already working nell'introdurne support in addition to removing most of the code is now obsolete.
We'll see when we will finally see action in this new unified drivers.

[Source]