AMDKFD Is Present For Linux 3.19 In Open-Source HSA Start

The AMDKFD driver, which has been under development in the public spotlight for the past few months as a necessary piece to having AMD HSA open-source support on Linux, will premiere with the Linux 3.19 kernel.

The AMDKFD driver has been merged into DRM-Next for landing into the Linux 3.19 merge window with the various open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver updates. (The pulling of AMDKFD driver actually happened last week, but for whatever reason my IP ended up being blocked from the FreeDesktop.org Git server so only regained access yesterday and have been catching up with the Git changes across the various interesting repositories.)

If you're not familiar with the AMDKFD driver or AMD's Heterogeneous System Architecture, read this original article.

The AMDKFD driver can be used in conjunction with AMD's open-source graphics stack (Gallium3D + AMD GPU LLVM back-end) and the recently open-sourced HSA runtime library as an initial HSA Linux implementation along with the Clover state tracker for OpenCL compute. It's ready for use and can be tested with AMD Kaveri APU hardware.

While open-source HSA is great and AMD's continued open-source OpenCL work, not found in Linux 3.19 is AMD's yet-to-be-released new DRM kernel driver that last I heard was still expected to begin making it out in patch form this year but would not be mainlined until at least Linux 3.20. It's too bad as meanwhile AMD's latest official closed-source Catalyst Linux binary driver is from September.