Developers Still Hoping For AMD DAL Support In Linux 4.7

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 30 April 2016 at 01:06 PM EDT. 23 Comments
AMD
Open-source developers working on the Radeon Linux graphics driver stack remain hopeful that their massive "DAL" code-base will be ready for merging with Linux 4.7.

DAL is the massive proposed addition to the AMDGPU DRM driver and is a lot of code opened up from the Catalyst proprietary driver. This display abstraction code is AMD's approach for implementing atomic mode-setting, DP MST, HDMI 2.0, better PowerPlay, better multi-display support, etc. It will also allow them to hopefully implement FreeSync support in their Linux driver.

When the DAL code was published, it received some criticism by DRM developers outside of AMD for its massive size, adding more complexities and abstractions to the code, not following all of the mainline kernel development practices, etc. But they hope to have this DAL code readied for the Linux 4.7 kernel.

They are in a bit of a rush to get DAL merged since the open-source Polaris GPU driver support for the next-generation hardware depends upon it. So far they continue making progress.

The very latest DAL code for testing can be found via the drm-next-4.7-wip-dal branch. Hitting the mailing list this weekend are also more DAL patches for review. Hopefully everything will get tidied up in time for Linux 4.7: stay tuned.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week