Linux 3.14 To Make AMD R600/700 OpenGL GS Possible

Besides needing Mesa 10.1 for AMD Radeon R600/R700 OpenGL support (and GL 3.3 for other AMD drivers/GPUs too), for the older graphics processors you will also need the Linux 3.14 kernel or newer.

In a fixes pull request sent in by Red Hat's David Airlie last night, a handful of DRM driver bugs were corrected. Additionally, there's an update to the command submission (CS) parser for the R600 and R700 generation GPUs (the Radeon HD 2000 through HD 4000 series hardware) to support setting up the OpenGL Geometry Shader rings. The Evergreen GPUs and newer already has this GS support within their CS parser.

The CS parser update changed less than two dozen lines of code and this OpenGL feature is needed in officially handling OpenGL 3.2/3.3. Additional information on geometry shaders is documented via the OpenGL.org Wiki.

This provides yet another reason for Canonical to hopefully ship with the Linux 3.14 kernel in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS instead of a Linux 3.13 kernel or a franken kernel as is planned right now. Ubuntu developers seemed to be mostly concerned with getting Intel Broadwell Linux support in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS but having OpenGL 3.3 support for more hardware on open-source drivers would be another win for a Long-Term Support release.