Was excited for the new #Blender 3.2 release from a few days ago. Was going to give the new HIP rendering on Linux a go on my Radeon 6900xt. Was looking at what was needed to make that happen...
10 fucking gigs. 10. I love that AMD gpus have an open source driver, but to use it for rendering...this may be a pass. Not to mention all the shit to make this *hopefully* work.
I kinda miss nvidia + CUDA for blender on Linux. Probably just going to do this work in Windows unfortunately. 🤢
@Suiseiseki I wasn’t very clear. I know it’s proprietary, I’m using the amdgpu driver currently which is open source. I don’t want to install 10 gigs of stuff just to use flu rendering in blender. I have no idea what else you are on about with size and shit violating the gpl. 🤷
It's not.
Sure the AMDGPU drivers in the kernel, Linux is licensed under the GPLv2 (which would make it free software, after all, you can't find "open source" written here: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html)
But, the driver isn't complete, as there is a fair amount of functionality in GPU firmware, which is proprietary software and the driver doesn't work without the firmware.
As AMDGPU is a derivative work of proprietary software (that is not standard system software), you'd need to gain an exception for the combination from every Linux developer to release it, in order not to violate the GPLv2, but of course that hasn't been done.
Nvidia has does a similar thing to AMD with their drivers.
The difference is that in the past, no part of the driver was released as free software and they didn't try to pretend that it was.
Nvidia has made some differences recently - whereas they moved most of the driver into the firmware and added a shim layer that was licensed under expat (if I remember correctly), thus pretending it was "open source" (as they knew they could get away with it).
@Suiseiseki Keep fighting the good fight, you seem passionate about it. If I was that concerned with the software to use the card, I wouldn't have bought it.
@Clifford Is this still a thing if you just download blender from blender.org and not use that fancy package manager?
@little_tommy The blender package is good. It's the GPU assisted feature the requires a driver that isn't part of the amdgpu setup. To get that working on Linux, it requires that 10 gig monstrosity 😖
@Clifford If you just delete that 125G Steam game you'd have plenty of room left over to do this :)
@Clifford
Just curious, that's not required for nvidia cards?
@little_tommy No sir, Nvidia cards use the cuda package to leverage GPU rendering which works on Linux with minimal effort and no 10 gig package.
The fact that it's 10GB is solely the fault of how AMD can't help but make their software proprietary and bloated.
The free software opencl driver in mesa is quite lean and it just works with opencl software that only uses the supported opencl features - the only issue is that such driver hasn't been developed enough to meet the full opencl specification.
You miss GPL violating proprietary software, just because it was smaller in size?