Userptr Support Set For AMD Radeon GPUs In Linux 3.18

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 21 August 2014 at 12:00 AM EDT. 1 Comment
RADEON
While it was originally set for Linux 3.17, with the Linux 3.18 kernel that's still months away will be userptr support for the AMD Radeon graphics driver.

The user pointer "userptr" 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.

Intel's DRM graphics driver in the kernel already led the userptr way and Radeon followed but it wasn't quite ready for Linux 3.17 due to waiting on the Radeon user-space code.

Alex Deucher sent in on Wednesday his initial Radeon DRM pull request for drm-next, which is code that won't land until the Linux 3.18 kernel merge window opens after the Linux 3.17 release. With this first pull request (and more expected in the weeks ahead), the only change over the Radeon Linux 3.17 code is the userptr support.

Separately, Intel has also been lining up its changes for Linux 3.18. The Radeon userptr pull request for drm-next-3.18 can be found on dri-devel.
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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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