AMD & Valve Deliver Better Kaveri / Kabini APU Experience With Upcoming Linux 7.1
A nice Easter surprise are some last minute updates submitted to DRM-Next of the final planned AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature changes for the upcoming Linux 7.1 feature cycle.
Most notable with this pull request to DRM-Next that was sent on Friday is enabling the AMDGPU driver by default for GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" APUs. These GCN 1.1 APUs like Kaveri, Kabini, and Mullins is now set to use the AMDGPU driver by default in place of the legacy Radeon DRM driver. This means much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and all-around a better experience in using AMDGPU than Radeon. The GCN 1.0/1.1 discrete GPUs and other hardware already transitioned to AMDGPU-by-default in prior kernels while this completes the transition for all GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 hardware now being on the AMDGPU driver.
After years of the AMDGPU driver having "experimental" support for GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs, over the past year it has been Timur Kristóf of the Valve Linux graphics team to steward all the work to complete feature parity on AMDGPU for these older GPUs/APUs, various bug fixes, and the patches to change the defaults. It was just last week that Timur sent out the patch changing the default for these CIK APUs. Now, fortunately, it's managed to get picked up in time for the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window.
The AMDGPU pull for Linux 7.1 also brought an audio regression fix, GPU partition updates, the new CONFIG_GCOV_PROFILE_AMDGPU Kconfig option to enable GCOV code profiling on the driver, SMU updates, and other fixes. The final pull request with these last AMDGPU updates planned for Linux 7.1 can be found via the mailing list.
Most notable with this pull request to DRM-Next that was sent on Friday is enabling the AMDGPU driver by default for GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" APUs. These GCN 1.1 APUs like Kaveri, Kabini, and Mullins is now set to use the AMDGPU driver by default in place of the legacy Radeon DRM driver. This means much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and all-around a better experience in using AMDGPU than Radeon. The GCN 1.0/1.1 discrete GPUs and other hardware already transitioned to AMDGPU-by-default in prior kernels while this completes the transition for all GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 hardware now being on the AMDGPU driver.
After years of the AMDGPU driver having "experimental" support for GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs, over the past year it has been Timur Kristóf of the Valve Linux graphics team to steward all the work to complete feature parity on AMDGPU for these older GPUs/APUs, various bug fixes, and the patches to change the defaults. It was just last week that Timur sent out the patch changing the default for these CIK APUs. Now, fortunately, it's managed to get picked up in time for the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window.
The AMDGPU pull for Linux 7.1 also brought an audio regression fix, GPU partition updates, the new CONFIG_GCOV_PROFILE_AMDGPU Kconfig option to enable GCOV code profiling on the driver, SMU updates, and other fixes. The final pull request with these last AMDGPU updates planned for Linux 7.1 can be found via the mailing list.