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by jorams 348 days ago
> I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs

The situation completely changed with the introduction of the AMDGPU drivers integrated into the kernel. This was like 10 years ago.

Before then the AMD driver situation on Linux was atrocious. The open source drivers performed so bad you'd get better performance out of Intel integrated graphics than an expensive AMD GPU, and their closed source drivers were so poorly updated you'd have to downgrade the entire world for the rest of your software to be compatible. At that time Nvidia was clearly ahead, even though the driver needs to be updated separately and they invented their own versions of some stuff.

With the introduction of AMDGPU and the years after that everything changed. AMD GPUs now worked great without any effort, while Nvidia's tendency to invent their own things really started grating. Much of the world started moving to Wayland, but Nvidia refused to support some important common standards. Those that really wanted their stuff to work on Nvidia had to introduce entirely separate code paths for it, while other parts of the landscape refused to do so. This started improving again a few years ago, but I'm not aware of the current state because I now only use Intel and AMD hardware.

2 comments

I use the amdgpu driver and my luck has not been as good as yours. Can't sleep my PC without having it wake up to fill my logs with spam [0] and eventually crash.

Then there is the (in)famous AMD reset bug that makes AMD a real headache to use with GPU passthrough. The card can't be properly reset when the VM shuts down so you have to reboot the PC to start the VM a second time. There are workarounds but they only work on some cards & scenarios [1] [2]. This problem goes back to around the 390 series cards so they've had forever to properly implement reset according to the pci spec but haven't. nvidia handles this flawlessly

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3911

[1] https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset

[2] https://github.com/inga-lovinde/RadeonResetBugFix

I was under the impression that nvidia just didn't let consumer cards do GPU passthrough.
For the longest time they had something in their driver that threw an error and bailed if it detected the GPU was being passed through to a VM but that was easily worked around in qemu or libvirt. nvidia must have realized that that check in the driver was pointless and removed it.
I just read your comment today. And the good news is, someone just found the commit that triggered the sleep issue literally a couple hours ago. Fingers crossed a fix is incoming.
Yes, I saw that! No response from the devs yet. Hopefully this gets into the kernel soon as a bugfix.
The open source driver for the Netboooks APU was never as good as either the Windows version, or the closed source that predated it.

Lesser OpenGL version, and I never managed to have hardware accelerated video until it died last year.