Initial AMD GFX11 / RDNA3 Support Lands In Mesa, RADV Prepares For Task Shaders

Overnight some notable open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver code was merged into what will be the Mesa 22.2 release next quarter.

First up and most notable, the recently talked about AMD "GFX11" graphics IP support for Mesa has landed. GFX11 is the next-generation graphics display IP/block almost definitively for RDNA3 and the successor to GFX10 as what was RDNA/RDNA2 and GFX9 for "Vega" / CDNA before that. Since the end of April, AMD engineers have begun posting a number of GFX11 patches not only for Mesa but also the AMDGPU Linux kernel DRM driver.

This GFX11 work goes along with all of the other recent patch series enabling different IP blocks in preparation for next-generation Radeon graphics cards launching later this year. AMD also already upstreamed the initial GFX11 target into LLVM 15.0 for release around September for having the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end support.

The merged GFX11 support currently has "This is most of it. Some bits are missing and they will be added later." Presumably there will be some new GFX11 hardware features enabled at a later date closer to launch. AMD's Mesa support focus is on the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver with the Mesa "RADV" driver being the unofficial driver worked on by the likes of Red Hat, Google, Valve, and others. RADV developers though will surely be working on GFX11/RDNA3 support based on the open-source patches for other components and also needing to get the ACO compiler back-end supported for GFX11.

As part of the GFX11 enablement within Mesa is also VCN4 Mesa patches for getting the Video Core Next 4.0 GPU-accelerated encode/decode working with the Gallium3D video acceleration state tracker. Still no signs of AV1 hardware encode support there but could be for a later patch series.

Lots of exciting code merged overnight into Mesa 22.2-devel.

Entirely separate from GFX11 but also merged overnight was some RADV refactoring to the queue submit code. This merge request is notable in that it's another step closer to supporting task shaders with this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. The task shaders work is another important step that goes along with the recent RADV mesh shaders work.

Exciting times as always in the open-source Linux graphics world.