Initial release of AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

[Mao, David]

Hi Dave, 
- How does AMD envisage development on this going forward, how will AMD internal developement team engage with community development efforts on this code base?
Our purpose of open-sourcing our vulkan driver is to accelerate the vulkan development by engagement between our internal development team and community.
We encourage users and developers to report issues  and raise feature requests on github issue tracker.
For detail, please refer to the "How to Contribute" section of README.md.( https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK)

- How will code come be integrated from the AMD internal codebase into this codebase?
We will do the merge regularly to align the code base. 
For issues reported on github issue tracker , we will do the development work on github dev branch directly.

- How will external contributions be taken into this code base and merged internally?
The external contribution would issue a Pull request to the dev branch.
After it passes code review and basic test, maintainer will merge the commits to dev branch.
The changes in dev branch will be tested internally and regularly merged back to master branch.

- How often will this codebase be updated? every day/week/month/hardware release?
Tentatively, the code changes in our internal branch will be weekly merged into github master branch.

- Will llvm master eventually be shippable? Will new llvm features be developed in the open?
For changes in LLVM, normally/eventually we will contribute to master as long as the changes could be accepted by the reviewers.

- At the moment radv and anv cooperate on developing new features under Khronos, will AMD be open to developing new features internally at Khronos while they are still pre-ratification?
IIRC, the KHX extension is unlikely to be drafted anymore which is good for open source driver.
In general, we would prefer to working unratified extensions in private branch and push to open source branch once it get ratified.

Thanks. 
Best Regards,
David

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Airlie [mailto:airlied at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2017 3:50 AM
To: Mao, David <David.Mao at amd.com>
Cc: amd-gfx at lists.freedesktop.org
Subject: Re: Initial release of AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

On 22 December 2017 at 21:03, Mao, David <David.Mao at amd.com> wrote:
> We are pleased to announce the initial release of AMD Open Source 
> Driver for Vulkan.
>
>
>
> The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is an open-source Vulkan driver 
> for Radeon graphics adapters on Linux. It is built on top of AMD's 
> Platform Abstraction Library (PAL), a shared component that is 
> designed to encapsulate certain hardware and OS-specific programming 
> details for many of AMD's 3D and compute drivers. Leveraging PAL can 
> help provide a consistent experience across platforms, including 
> support for recently released GPUs and compatibility with AMD developer tools.
>
>
>
> The driver uses the LLVM-Based Pipeline Compiler (LLPC) library to 
> compile shaders that compose a particular VkPipeline object. LLPC 
> builds on LLVM's existing shader compilation infrastructure for AMD 
> GPUs to generate code objects compatible with PAL's pipeline ABI.
>
>
>
> The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is designed to support the 
> following
> features:
>
> - Vulkan 1.0
>
> - More than 30 extensions
>
> - Radeon GPUProfiler tracing
>
> - Built-in debug and profiling tools
>
> - Mid-command buffer preemption and SR-IOV virtualization
>
>
>
> The following features and improvements are planned in future releases:
>
> - Upcoming versions of the Vulkan API
>
> - Hardware performance counter collection through RenderDoc
>
> - LLPC optimizations to improve GPU-limited performance and compile 
> time
>
> - Optimizations to improve CPU-limited performance
>
>
>
> Please refer to  the README file under
> https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK   for more information.  Looking
> forward to hearing your feedback.

Excellent!

Before I spend much time digging into the code, I am wondering how much thought on development model and future development has been put into this from AMD perspective.

How does AMD envisage development on this going forward, how will AMD internal developement team engage with community development efforts on this code base?

How will code come be integrated from the AMD internal codebase into this codebase?
How will external contributions be taken into this code base and merged internally?
How often will this codebase be updated? every day/week/month/hardware release?
Will llvm master eventually be shippable? Will new llvm features be developed in the open?

At the moment radv and anv cooperate on developing new features under Khronos, will AMD be open to developing new features internally at Khronos while they are still pre-ratification?

Dave.