Trying Out AMDGPU DRM-Next Ahead Of Linux 4.20~5.0

With the two main set of AMDGPU DRM driver updates merged (one and two) to DRM-Next ahead of the next Linux kernel cycle, I decided to run some benchmarks on this code using Vega and Polaris hardware for seeing how the performance compares to that of the Linux 4.18 stable and Linux 4.19 Git kernels.

Linux 4.20 (or what will likely be renamed to Linux 5.0) will be another exciting release in the AMD space. This next kernel brings AMD Picasso APU support, initial xGMI support and AMDKFD compute support for Vega 20, AMDKFD compute code is merged into AMDGPU, various power management improvements, GPU scheduler load balancing, GPUVM virtual memory performance enhancements, and other updated bits.

My testing of DRM-Next as of this past weekend was done with Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards. With DRM-Next, Linux 4.18.11, and Linux 4.19 Git on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the system also upgraded to Mesa 18.3-dev built against LLVM 8.0 SVN via the Padoka PPA. In other words, a very bleeding-edge open-source Radeon graphics stack.

The experience wasn't entirely trouble-free as with F1 2017 and Rise of the Tomb Raider when running on the DRM-Next kernel, hangs were encountered. Our other common Linux OpenGL/Vulkan games/benchmarks were working fine. There weren't any other troubles/regressions encountered yet on this test system when using the DRM-Next code that will in turn be merged to the mainline Linux kernel in about two weeks when the 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle kicks off.

On the following pages are some benchmarks looking at any AMDGPU DRM-Next performance changes on the RX 580 and RX Vega 64. Benchmarks via the Phoronix Test Suite.