AMD Has More Developers Working On Their Open-Source Driver Behind The Scenes

While there's just a handful of names that Phoronix readers are familiar with when it comes to AMD's open-source Linux driver developers and those from AMD who communicate with the community in our forums, it turns out there are many more developers at AMD becoming involved as part of their new AMDGPU driver stack.

In the recent article There's A Lot Of Exciting AMDGPU DRM Code Brewing For Eventual Catalyst Support, I mentioned that appearing as the patch author on many of these new, experimental patches was Harry Wentland. He isn't a name we haven't seen much of before in terms of open-source AMD contributions, but as then pointed out in the comments in our forums and in an email I received from an AMD developer, there are more people actually involved and Harry is just serving as the public face for these new patches.

Harry also commented in our forums, "There's actually a whole team working on this. I just volunteered to be the public face, at least for the initial push. On [a Git branch] you can see patches from others on the team."

Besides the usual contributors like Alex Deucher, Michel Dänzer, and Christian König, other active contributors now to the AMDGPU kernel driver also include:

- Anatoli Antonovitch
- Mykola Lysenko
- Andrey Grodzovsky
- Mohammad Mohammadnia
- Jordan Lazare
- Leo Liu
- Ken Xue
- Eagle Yeh
- Harry Wentland
- Bas Nieuwenhuizen
- Monk Liu
- David Rokhvarg
- Maruthi Srinivas Bayyavarapu
- Xiangliang Yu
- Clark Zheng
- Wan ZongShun
- Sonny Jiang
- Ben Goz
- Maninder Singh

And others.

It's great to see more at AMD involved in the AMDGPU driver for supporting the Radeon Carrizo/Tonga/Fiji and all future GPUs. Of course, it makes sense that more developers become involved so that this kernel driver can get into shape so that it's also suitable for use by the Catalyst Linux driver when this binary blob becomes isolated to user-space and relies upon this shared DRM driver. The open-source Linux graphics driver stack being assembled there is one of the shining lights at the company right now, albeit given the small Linux market-share, is unlikely to do too much to help their bottom line.