AMDGPU/Radeon For Linux 4.5 Drops UMS Support, Brings Optimizations

Just minutes after writing about how AMDGPU PowerPlay support made it into AMD's drm-next-4.5 branch, that Git branch is now called for pulling into DRM-Next. Besides the PowerPlay support for the latest Radeon GPUs, there are also a number of other changes.

Aside from the much talked about AMDGPU PowerPlay support, the Radeon/AMDGPU DRM driver changes for Linux 4.5 features optimizations for GPU VM and the GPU scheduler. This next release will also drop UMS (user-space mode-setting) support from the Radeon DRM driver with most people in the past number of years using KMS. This just follows the route already taken by Intel and Nouveau in abandoning user-space mode-setting support.

Some of the other Radeon/AMDGPU changes for Linux 4.5 include EDC initialization for Carrizo, a DisplayPort audio fix, support for fetching the video BIOS directly from ROM on dedicated GPUs, new helpers, and other bug fixes.

The full list of the AMDGPU/Radeon changes queued up for ultimately merging into Linux 4.5 can be found via this pull request.