Linus accepts AMD Display Code for Linux Kernel

Huge day for Linux.

All that’s left is to fully upstream the ROCm OpenCL stack to be routinely synced with libdrm and Mesa.

This is the AMDGPU Pro Linux stack moving to the new Mesa stack for Vega on down.

Modern stack, OpenCL is a win/win for Blender devs and creative community.

This is great news. Linux is amazing but as Blender, a bit misunderstood.

How does OpenCL being in the kernel benefit the opensource community? is there added performance or does it just become a default that is available to everyone?

OpenCL is not and cannot be in the kernel.

Can you explain why this is?

Im ok for the mass public, ( and again, there we dont really speak about Linux itself, but mostly about OS based on Linux ( Unbutu, etc ).

Now, for server etc, Linux is largely used ( if not the most used )… and there we are mostly speak about professional applications ( i dont think most users dont even know what is ROCm ).

This said, ROCm 1.7 is out. supporting Caffe, Tensercore etc…

This is great news.
Massive render farm based on Linux using AMD cards for personal use at home.

Could someone explain what exactly this means for Linux (and blender)? I’m afraid I don’t know enough about either the kernel or the code that AMD is supplying to understand the significance.

Could it mean it will might be possible to do OpenCL rendering on Linux using the open source drivers?
That’s what I’m hoping it means, anyway.

OpenCL rendering with open source driver is already possible. Even with AMDGPU PRO on Vega, it’s already the case actually as it uses RoCm. And you can also compile everything yourself. The point of this inclusion is to make it available for all distros without user needing to do anything else than install packages from official distro’s repositories.
So if you use AMDGPU pro or are using a Ubuntu-based distro (for which there are repos with RoCm), you can already benefit from all this changes without waiting for 4.15 kernel.

Thanks. I wasn’t aware of this in general or ROCm in specific. So, if I understand you correctly, the open source drivers can currently render using OpenCL, but with the new kernel they’ll be able to do so “out of the box,” so to speak.