Radeon Driver Gets Golden Registers In Linux 3.10

A second Linux 3.10 Radeon DRM driver pull request was submitted by AMD's Alex Deucher. The pull request sent to Red Hat's David Airlie for the DRM sub-system mentions the "golden registers" addition as being the highlight of this batch of new open-source AMD Linux graphics code.

Last week the first 3.10 Radeon DRM pull request came in and now there's a second. The first pull request brought with it tiling support for the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics processors and the very popular and exciting Radeon UVD video decoding support. The RadeonSI tiling and UVD support were the big additions in the first pull and then an assortment of bug-fixes and other minor changes.

With the second pull request, it's mostly mundane fixes too. However, Deucher notes, "Nothing too major here. Mostly bug fixes. The big changes are adding golden register init for 7xx and newer asics and some audio cleanups."

According to this Git commit, golden arrays for AMD Radeon graphics processors come down to arrays of register settings that need to be initialized at the ASIC (GPU) start-up.

The sets of new "golden" registers to initialize at start time were added for the Radeon HD 4000 (R7xx), Radeon HD 5000 (Evergreen), Radeon HD 6000 (Cayman / Northern Islands), and the Radeon HD 7000 (Southern Islands) series.

This second Radeon 3.10 pull request can be found on dri-devel. Aside from open-source Radeon support, we also already have an idea for the Intel graphics changes as well as for the open-source NVIDIA Tegra.