AMD Posts Linux Graphics Driver Patches Enabling SMU 14.0 IP

AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be busy working on enabling next-generation graphics processors with their upstream open-source driver.

In the past few months there's been the GFX 11.5 graphics block enabling, the DCN 3.5 display block, and enabling other new intellectual property (IP) blocks pointing at potential use in an RDNA3.5 / "RDNA3 refresh" type product. Out today are patches enabling SMU 14.0 as an apparently big update to that block.

The SMU on the AMD Radeon graphics processors is effectively the system management unit that runs the power management firmware and is responsible for various power management tasks of the GPU.

A set of 5 patches posted today enable the SMU 14.0 support for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. The new code is 3.7k lines for enabling SMU 14.0, in part due to the auto-generated code. The new code doesn't reveal any key details about any power management changes coming with the next-gen AMD graphics. In any event it's good seeing this code continue to flow out pre-launch so that it will ideally be all upstreamed in the mainline Linux kernel prior to any graphics processors appearing with this new IP.