AMDGPU In Linux 4.10 To Have Better Power Management, New VM Manager

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 27 October 2016 at 08:12 PM EDT. 39 Comments
RADEON
Alex Deucher has sent in the first pull request to DRM-Next of early material to stage for Radeon/AMDGPU DRM kernel driver changes targeting Linux 4.10.

As usual, most of the changes these days are focused on the AMDGPU driver as opposed to mature Radeon code that's primarily for pre-GCN hardware.

AMDGPU highlights from this first Linux 4.10 DRM-Next request include support for multiple virtual displays (AMDGPU virtual display support was first added in Linux 4.9), a new VM manager to support non-contiguous video RAM buffers, support for UVD power-gating on more hardware, various power management improvements, and various code clean-ups and bug fixes.

In total there's over four thousand lines of changed code in this first (of likely two or three) feature pull requests of material being prepped for Linux 4.10. Complete list of changes via this mailing list post.

Sadly, not queued yet is the DAL display abstraction layer code in order to support audio over HDMI/DP, HDMI 2.0, FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync, and various other modern display features... No word from AMD yet on when they may try to mainline the DAL code once again, but in particular the lack of audio support with the latest AMD GPUs is rather frustrating, to me at least as one of the most annoying problems with Fiji / Fury.

This pull request also doesn't enable the GCN 1.0 or GCN 1.1 experimental support by default yet, which will be disappointing to some who want to use AMDGPU rather than Radeon for GCN 1.0/1.1 hardware. This default change-over probably won't happen for a while due to needing to work out any issues/regressions while also ensuring the supported user-space (latest Mesa, DDX, libdrm, etc) is widely-deployed by all major distributions to avoid causing any headaches otherwise.
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