Valve Developer Contributes Open-Source Driver Fixes For 12 Year Old Hawaii GPUs
Valve's open-source Linux graphics team continues carrying out great feats from getting NVIDIA DLSS working on the open-source NVK driver to enhancing Linux GPU driver support for hardware long forgotten about by the hardware vendors. The latest improvement from Valve's stellar group of open-source contributors are some fixes that benefit old Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards that are more than one decade old.
Timur Kristóf has landed RADV and RadeonSI changes today focused on workarounds for a command submission register allocation hang and a Hawaii GPU hang found with the RADV Vulkan driver presumably due to a hardware bug.
For those using old Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics cards still for Linux gaming, there was a "random" hang tracked down for those GPUs. With Valve's Dota 2 game usually within 30 minutes of gameplay or when watching a replay there would be a hang. The Linux port of Rise of the Tomb Raider was another game/benchmark where hangs could be observed with Hawaii GPUs on Linux.
Timur discovered a workaround to avoid those Hawaii hangs although there are performance implications due to reducing the primitive rate for triangle lists. This Hawaii issue wasn't officially documented by AMD but seems to work even if it's not well understood for now. In any case surprising to see this issue tracked down after 12 years since AMD Hawaii GPUs first launched.
The other workaround is disabling compute queues for GFX6/GFX7 hardware where the register allocation bug is present.
Those still using these old AMD Radeon GPUs can learn more via this merge request. The code was merged today for Mesa 25.3-devel but is also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 25.2 stable series.
Timur Kristóf has landed RADV and RadeonSI changes today focused on workarounds for a command submission register allocation hang and a Hawaii GPU hang found with the RADV Vulkan driver presumably due to a hardware bug.
For those using old Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics cards still for Linux gaming, there was a "random" hang tracked down for those GPUs. With Valve's Dota 2 game usually within 30 minutes of gameplay or when watching a replay there would be a hang. The Linux port of Rise of the Tomb Raider was another game/benchmark where hangs could be observed with Hawaii GPUs on Linux.
Timur discovered a workaround to avoid those Hawaii hangs although there are performance implications due to reducing the primitive rate for triangle lists. This Hawaii issue wasn't officially documented by AMD but seems to work even if it's not well understood for now. In any case surprising to see this issue tracked down after 12 years since AMD Hawaii GPUs first launched.
The other workaround is disabling compute queues for GFX6/GFX7 hardware where the register allocation bug is present.
Those still using these old AMD Radeon GPUs can learn more via this merge request. The code was merged today for Mesa 25.3-devel but is also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 25.2 stable series.