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I would like to know how many drivers for AMD graphics card exist for Linux and whether they are proprietary or open source and what are the differences among them.

The introduction of this Phoronix article:

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with its ACO back-end by default is now winning nearly across the board against not only AMD's AMDVLK Vulkan driver with LLVM back-end but also AMDGPU-PRO with the proprietary shader compiler back-end.

Mention 3 drivers:

  1. The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV"
  2. AMD's AMDVLK Vulkan driver
  3. AMDGPU-PRO

So my understanding is that there are 3 drivers:

  1. A community maintained open-source driver called RADV.
  2. An AMD-maintained open-source driver called AMDVLK.
  3. An AMD-maintained closed-source driver called AMDGPU-PRO

Questions:

  1. Is my understanding right?

  2. What are the differences between these 3 drivers?

  3. Where can I find the source code for (1) and (2)?

    Regarding (2), I found this repository, but it seems to contain only some JSON file, it doesn't look like a driver at all

  4. Why is AMD maintaining (2) and (3) instead of, for example, dropping (2) and join the community effort in (1)?

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  • I was wondering about the exact same thing. Especially what the difference is between RADV and AMDVLK.
    – BulletBob
    Commented Jan 15, 2021 at 9:31
  • One of the differences I encountered was how the respective drivers are supported by third-party software. Not sure why this even matters, one would think that Vulkan or OpenGL take care of glossing over this aspect, but I haven't been able to get 3D hardware acceleration to work with VMware and have been in a support case with them for more than half a year. So far no luck getting it to work. I've also tried this one, btw: launchpad.net/~kisak (stable one) ...
    – 0xC0000022L
    Commented Jun 30, 2021 at 21:08

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