AMD Submits Initial AMDGPU Graphics Driver Improvements Ahead Of Linux 5.1

The initial batch of new AMDGPU feature changes slated for the Linux 5.1 were sent out on Friday evening for staging in DRM-Next until the 5.1 kernel merge window opens at the end of February or early March.

As is standard practice, this will likely be the first of at least one or two more feature pulls of new material for Linux 5.1 when it comes to the AMDGPU DRM driver. There still is 2~3 more weeks of feature work that could land in DRM-Next before its cutoff ahead of the 5.0 release that marks the beginning of the Linux 5.1 merge window.

Many of the changes in today's AMDGPU pull request were items previously covered on Phoronix when monitoring the AMD open-source driver development branches. New work includes:

- PCI Express bandwidth utilization is now exposed to user-space via sysfs. Via the DRM sysfs area is now a pcie_bw file that exposes the amount of data sent/received by the GPU over the past second via PCIe.

- Vega power management updates including initial support for BACO (Bus Active, Chip Off) on Vega 10 and Vega 20 hardware.

- Shader clocks and memory clocks are now exposed via hwmon.

- Support for Delta Color Compression (DCC) on scanout surfaces.

- Support for multiple interrupt handler (IH) rings for SOC15 hardware.

- XGMI fixes for the new interconnect coming with EPYC 2 platforms.

- The old Sea Islands dynamic power management (DPM) code was removed with the newer PowerPlay code being quite mature now for GCN 1.1.

- Proper handling for kexec.

- Better page-flipping in DC along with other display code updates.

- Continued integration work between the AMDGPU and AMDKFD code-bases.

The current list of queued patches can be found via this pull request.