AMD Publishes Open-Source Graphics Code For Mullins & Beema
AMD rolled out the Beema and Mullins hardware yesterday. The AMD "Beema" APUs are targeted for mobile products like notebook PCs while AMD Mullins APUs are low-power processors for ultra low-powered devices. The low-end Mullins APUs sport Radeon R2/R3 Graphics. The AMD Mullins APUs include the A10 Micro-6700T, A4 Micro-6400T, and E1 Micro-6200Tl. The Beema APUs include the E2-6010, E2-6110, A4-6210, and A6-6310. The Mullins models top out at 4.5 Watts while the Beema APUs top out at 15 Watts.
We unfortunately had no early access to the hardware so really don't know how well it performs under Linux. Today they started rolling out the open-source Radeon graphics driver code for the new APUs, but it will be a while before the code is mainlined.
AMD's Alex Deucher sent out eight patches for the Radeon DRM kernel driver to support both Beema and Mullins. The work involved adding the new PCI IDs, some mode-setting updates, Dynamic Power Management (DPM) support, UVD video decoding support, and VCE video encoding support.
The Mullins PCI IDs include 0x9850, 0x9851, 0x9852, 0x9853, 0x9854, 0x9855, 0x9856, 0x9857, 0x9858, 0x9859, 0x985A, 0x985B, 0x985C, 0x985D, 0x985E, and 0x985F. There's also then two libdrm patches for supporting Mullins via this DRM library.
At the time of writing, Beema/Mullins patches for Mesa's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver have yet to appear on the mailing list nor have I seen them in any Mesa Git branches.
On the kernel side, now that we're half-way through the Linux 3.15 cycle and past the merge window, the soonest we'll see this new AMD APU support within the mainline Linux kernel would be in Linux 3.16, which will probably not be here for about 15 or 16 weeks from now. On the Mesa side, there is the Mesa 10.2 release happening in just about one month, but its merge window will close in the coming days.
Update: There's now two mailing list patches out for adding AMD Mullins support to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.
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