Missing AMD "Oland" UVD GPU Support Has Been Found

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 20 January 2014 at 11:42 AM EST. 8 Comments
AMD
If you're one of the owners of the few AMD Radeon GPUs based upon "Oland" like the HD 8570/8670 graphics cards, open-source UVD support is coming.

It turns out that AMD's Unified Video Decoding (UVD) support in the open-source Radeon driver has been missing up until now. The missing support hasn't been due to the IP being blocked at AMD or any serious matter like that, but it turns out the Oland chip identifier was missing from a switch statement in the Radeon DRM driver for loading the appropriate firmware and setting the chip ID. Oland uses the same "Tahiti" UVD firmware as for the Radeon HD 7900 series graphics cards from which Oland is derived/re-branded, but the Direct Rendering Manager driver was just missing the two simple lines of code.

For AMD Oland owners missing out on UVD hardware video acceleration the patch can be found on dri-devel and will make it into the Linux 3.14 kernel and quite possibly the back-ported to existing stable kernel series.

This silly oversight in the code comes just weeks after Radeon DRM driver developers also discovered a major RadeonSI performance improvement as a a silly but critical bug where only the render back-ends on the first shader engine of the modern AMD GPUs were being enabled and the rest were ignored. That fix made it into Linux 3.13.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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