AMDGPU, HEVC Support & More Added To Mainline Mesa 11.0

Just after writing this morning about libdrm 2.4.63 being released and that it's needed for the AMDGPU Mesa support to land, the code indeed is now in mainline! There's the mainline support going into Mesa 11.0 for supporting the hardware via the AMDGPU DRM driver -- Tonga, Carrizo, Fiji, and future new hardware. There's also now HEVC video decode support on capable hardware via the VDPAU state tracker and other improvements related to this AMDGPU code push.

While the newer AMD GPUs are still using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, the AMDGPU winsys had to be added along with other changes made for supporting the new kernel driver. In the past hour, the necessary support landed in Mesa!

Highlights of all the new Mesa Git code in the past hour include:

- GLES texture-float extensions for Gallium3D.

- EXT_depth_bounds_test support in RadeonSI.

- HEVC support in Gallium3D VDPAU assuming you have a new AMDGPU-using GPU capable of supporting H.265/HEVC in hardware.

- The AMDGPU winsys.

- The open-sourced Addrlib from Catalyst was added.

- Radeon R9 Fury "Fiji" GPU support (but will need Linux 4.3+ for the kernel-side support).

- H.264 performance hardware decoder for Tonga.

- The Fiji, Tonga, Carrizo, and Iceland GPUs now supported by the latest Mesa code can be found via this commit.

A few weeks back I already ran some AMDGPU benchmarks in The New AMD GPU Open-Source Driver On Linux 4.2 Works, But Still A Lot Of Work Ahead but will run some more as Mesa 11.0 approaches, but I don't expect any big differences for Tonga given the kernel driver still lacks the dGPU power management support.