AMD Sends In First Batch Of GPU Driver Updates For Linux 4.4

AMD's Alex Deucher sent in the first pull request today for DRM-Next for kernel graphics driver updates that in turn will target the Linux 4.4 kernel.

This first pull request of Linux 4.4 material for AMDGPU and Radeon DRM drivers include a few new features. However, they heavily lean in favor of new features for AMDGPU rather than the Radeon driver that supports the hardware pre-Tonga. There's about 37 patches for the AMDGPU driver while just six for the mature Radeon driver.

There are cursor fixes ported from Radeon to the AMDGPU DRM driver, the AMDGPU GPU scheduler is enabled by default, there's a number of new GPU VM debugging options, and support for new AtomBIOS opcodes. For pre-SI GPUs there is also efficiency improvements to the command stream checker. Of course, there's also fixes and other code clean-ups as part of this pull request too.

Sadly, not part of this pull request is power management / re-clocking for discrete GPUs on the AMDGPU driver, such as the Fiji and Tonga GPUs, which is leading to slow open-source performance right now for these newer AMD GPUs.

This initial Linux 4.4 Radeon/AMDGPU pull request can be found via this mailing list post.