AMDGPU Looks Like It Will Be Supported For Mesa 11.0

Earlier this week I delivered my initial benchmarks of the new AMDGPU Linux driver stack for supporting the AMD Radeon R9 285 "TONGA" and all new/future GPUs like Carrizo and Fiji. The new AMDGPU kernel driver is present in the upcoming Linux 4.2 kernel while on the user-space side there's separate code branches required for libdrm and Mesa. Fortunately, it looks like that work will be merged soon.

While the AMDGPU DRM driver still is using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver in user-space, changes to libdrm and the Mesa winsys are needed for handling this new DRM driver. All of that user-space work is currently living in separate Git repositories for now, but it appears that the support will all be mainlined ahead of the upcoming Mesa 11.0 release in September (formerly known as Mesa 10.7).

AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák confirmed in response to a question in our forums that the code is good enough for merging in Mesa 11.0, so hopefully that will all pan out and it happens so that this new AMDGPU code becomes accessible to more users with the very latest Radeon hardware. Should it not happen, the support wouldn't appear in a released version of Mesa for another three months until the next major release.

Aside from Linux 4.2+ and the libdrm/Mesa code, there's also the new xf86-video-amdgpu DDX driver and new firmware files that also must be present for everything to pan out and provide open-source hardware acceleration.