Re: Have GPGPU support in guix?

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi Jonathan,

Jonathan Brielmaier <address@hidden> writes:

> 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).

What about firmware?  Do we know which AMD Radeon cards, if any, can be
used without including nonfree software in the OS?

A quick web search would seem to suggest that on Debian, it is very
commonly required to install the 'firmware-linux-nonfree' and/or
'firmware-amd-graphics' packages from non-free.

     Thanks,
       Mark