Radeon/AMDGPU Updates For The Linux 4.8 Kernel

Alex Deucher has submitted the main feature pull request for DRM-Next of the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver changes for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.8.

Some will be sad though, the AMDGPU material for Linux 4.8 doesn't contain the huge DAL display abstraction layer code that's needed for bringing the open-source AMDGPU driver display capabilities more on par with the former closed-source driver stack and also necessary for supporting new features like FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync.

What is included for drm-next-4.8 on the red side are ATPX improvements for better discrete GPU power control on PowerXpress systems, new power features for Carrizo/BR/Stoney hardware, pipelines buffer object moves and evictions in TTM, GPU scheduler improvements, GPU reset improvements, overclocking on dGPUs, code clean-ups, and many bug fixes.

The AMDGPU overclocking support would be the main end-user feature for Linux 4.8 when it comes to Radeon/AMDGPU. This overclocking support was previously explored on Phoronix and will just work with the latest AMDGPU-supported hardware.

For more details on these AMDGPU/Radeon changes that will be merged into the mainline Linux kernel in a few weeks during the 4.8 merge window, see this mailing list post. Looks like I'll be running some Linux 4.7 vs. AMDGPU drm-next benchmarks this weekend!