AMD Radeon Graphics Get Many Changes For Linux 3.17

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 5 August 2014 at 01:16 PM EDT. 12 Comments
RADEON
The Radeon DRM driver changes have been published for queuing into drm-next before hitting the mainline Linux 3.17 kernel tree.

Among the exciting work to be found for the AMD Radeon graphics kernel driver in Linux 3.17 include:

- Good Hawaii support for the AMD Radeon R9 290 series. The R9 290/290X should now work with the open-source driver at long last, but besides Linux 3.17 you'll need newer microcode files and also the latest Gallium3D code. Once 3.17-rc1 has been tagged, I'll move ahead with my open-source Radeon Hawaii benchmarks on the R9 290.

- Support for a new firmware format to make updates easier to manage.

- Dynamic Power Management (DPM) is now enabled by default on more GPUs. DPM is being re-enabled by default for Cayman and BTC hardware.

- GPU VM improvements.

- Support for uncached and write combined GTT buffers.

- Userptr support. The user pointer support allows turning a memory pointer supplied by user-space into a buffer object for the DRM kernel graphics driver. Userptr can be used for GPGPU/compute scenarions and other situation for feeding memory objects from user-space to the kernel driver.

- Various other fixes and improvements.

The full listing of Radeon DRM changes lined up for the Linux 3.17 merge window can be found via the DRI development list.

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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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