AMD News Archives

The latest Linux kernel patch activity out of AMD in preparation for next-generation "Zen 4" processors is enabling AMD Performance Monitoring Version Two "PerfMonV2" support.

AMD today announced the ship date and suggested pricing for their much anticipated Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor as well as new Ryzen 7/5/3 series processors.

One of the most prominent additions to the Linux 5.17 kernel is the introduction of the AMD P-State driver akin to Intel's P-State driver and aims to deliver better energy efficiency than AMD Zen 2 and newer processors currently on the ACPI CPUFreq driver. With Linux 5.18 an AMD P-State tracer tool is to be included with the kernel source tree for helping to analyze and tune this new driver.

AMD posted this morning a new Linux kernel patch series for enabling a new feature for "upcoming processors" that is almost definitively for Zen 4, continuing their work in recent weeks around more open-source patches in preparing for their next-generation processors.

AMD continues recruiting more Linux engineers to join the company not only for their EPYC server processors given the dominance of Linux on the server/HPC front but also as part of their growing Linux client ambitions covering custom SoCs using Linux from Valve's Steam Deck to the Tesla in-vehicle infotainment system over to just running AMD Ryzen processors on Linux. This is good to see given AMD's traditionally much smaller Linux pool of talent compared to Intel's massive Linux/open-source engineering headcount.

Last month I covered the issue of Lenovo's ACPI Platform Profile support for AMD-powered laptops was busted on Linux. The platform profile controls were exposed but in reality did not work. Fortunately, fixed up support for this feature is now on the way to the Linux kernel for letting users choose between better performance or extended battery life and cooler operating device.

The AMD HSMP kernel driver is currently under review for possible inclusion into the Linux 5.18 cycle. HSMP in this context is the Host System Management Port.

AMD engineers on Sunday night sent out a patch series getting x2APIC virtualization "x2AVIC" support for the AMD SVM driver with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

AMD today pushed updated Family 19h / Zen 3 CPU microcode to the linux-firmware.git tree.

While AMD EPYC processors already deliver great performance under Linux, with the Linux 5.18 kernel this spring is a scheduler improvement that can provide measurable speed-ups for various workloads on processors where there are multiple last level caches (LLCs) per node, such as with the case of EPYC.

With the forthcoming Linux 5.17 kernel there is the new AMD P-State driver aiming to provide better power efficiency than the ACPI CPUFreq driver that has long been used on AMD platforms. For complementing that AMD P-State driver, AMD has also been working on adding their CPU P-State support to Linux's cpupower tool.

The Linux and Coreboot support for the AMD "Sabrina" SoC continues to be worked on while recently Google has merged a new motherboard target for a Sabrina-powered Chromebook.

As was expected with last week AMD receiving all necessary regulatory approvals for its acquisition of Xilinx, today the deal successfully closed.

While PowerTOP was immensely helpful when the Intel open-source project started out in 2007 for reporting untuned kernel parameters and noting what's keeping the CPU from reaching its deeper sleep states, over the past decade Linux has greatly improved when it comes to power management and better behavior out-of-the-box. PowerTOP continues to see occasional commits and new releases, but there's less talk about it these days than going back a number of years when it was a must-have for x86_64 laptops. In any case I was curious to see if following its tips still provided any meaningful difference on a modern AMD Ryzen powered laptop.

As part of AMD Rembrandt APUs having USB4 support with that specification based on the Thunderbolt 3 protocol, AMD in recent months has been making a number of Linux driver improvements to enhance the USB4/Thunderbolt support for their platforms.

AMD just announced that it has received approval from all necessary regulators to proceed with its acquisition of Xilinx.

The LUMI supercomputer in Finland is still being assembled with its 2,560 nodes consisting of a 64-core AMD Trento CPU and four AMD Instinct MI250X GPU accelerators per node. This 375+ PFLOPs was supposed to come online by the end of 2021 but was challenged by the supply chain crisis and is now aiming for general availability by the middle of the year. While the hardware is still coming together, their HPC engineers have been hard at work optimizing the open-source Linux software stack.

After establishing a new organization within AMD last year focused on improving AMD client platforms on Linux, they are now hiring again for this endeavor.

There's been some activity on AMD open-source firmware support for newer hardware platforms but for those wanting a fully open-source firmware stack, there remains work on older generations of AMD server platforms. Michał Żygowski of firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented today at FOSDEM 2022 as to the current state AMD open-source firmware efforts around Coreboot.

Intel has for a while been posting Linux kernel patches for implementing Control Flow Enforcement (CET) technology, both for the Indirect Branch Tracking and Shadow Stack features. However, as written about earlier this week, Intel is focusing on the shadow stack support for user-space. The patches posted this past week by Intel for Linux Shadow Stack for User-Space support was limited to their own processors but fortunately it's appearing to be work out fine for AMD CPUs too.

As part of an effort to update LLVM Clang's "-mtune" handling to cater to newer processors, AMD Zen processors with LLVM/Clang 15 later this year will be able to enjoy faster and more accurate square root calculations with tuning to use SQRTSS/SQRTPS instructions.

Back in November AMD announced the MI200 accelerator that has seen its Linux open-source driver support developed under the "Aldebaran" codename going back to February of last year. The AMD developers are now removing the "experimental" flag from that Aldebaran class GPU support.

ACPI Platform Profile support on Linux has been useful for catering to balancing your power or performance preferences with modern laptops on Linux. It has worked well in general across various devices tested but it turns out to be a dud currently when it comes to AMD Ryzen powered Lenovo systems.

AMD open-source engineers sent out a request for comments on a new kernel feature called "PAN", or Process Adaptive autoNUMA. Early numbers shown by AMD indicate that PAN can help with performance in some workloads on their latest server hardware by a measurable amount.

One of the additions with EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors introduced last year was SEV-SNP as the "Secure Nested Paging" addition to AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization found with EPYC processors. While they have maintained an out-of-tree Linux source repository with the SEV-SNP patches, the mainline kernel is still lacking support for these latest security features but the code continues to undergo revisions and review for its eventual upstreaming.

Thanks to hiring more Linux developers and preparing to ramp up for next-generation hardware support, the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel is going to be another exciting step forward for AMD Linux customers.

Last week I noted about EDAC changes in Linux 5.17 for future AMD CPUs. The "Error Detection and Correction" work included AMD adding RDDR5 / LRDDR5 support to their driver and new CPU model IDs that appear to be for Zen 4. Also working on next-gen AMD processor support in Linux 5.17 are recent SMCA changes.

A change merged overnight with the libata subsystem updates for Linux 5.17 means that some older AMD hardware will be able to boot quicker by avoiding an otherwise mandated sleep period.

Recently there have been reports of some AMD Ryzen powered notebooks being unable to correctly suspend from resume in s2idle mode. It appears the issue ultimately stems from a firmware setting issue and a set of Linux patches were sent out today to address the condition.

The AMD P-State driver that has been available in patch form since September and stems from AMD's collaborations with Valve around the Steam Deck will be introduced to mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel.

Back in 2020 Microsoft announced their "Pluton" security chip that woulld be coming to future AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm processors. The Pluton security processor is designed to improve the system security under Windows and now we find out that AMD's forthcoming Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile processors will be the first featuring this security feature that may prove controversial to Linux/open-source fans.

As part of our various year-end articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news of the year with the many milestones they achieved in ramping up their support both for desktop/mobile and server hardware and continued successes when it comes to their open-source Radeon graphics driver stack.

AMD Smart Trace Buffer "STB" support is ready for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel cycle.

AMD on Christmas Eve posted their seventh iteration of the AMD P-State Linux driver as their new CPU frequency scaling solution for Zen 2+ to make use of ACPI CPPC for ultimately striving toward optimal power efficiency with a focus on mobile and desktop systems.

The newest Linux hardware support patches for the kernel revolve around i2c bus sharing support for newer SoCs where the i2c bus is being shared by AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP). This i2c controller is based on common DesignWare IP but new kernel code is being crafted for handling that bus sharing between the kernel and the PSP co-processor.

AMD's Yellow Carp enablement has been going back to early summer for this next-generation APU that is better known as Rembrandt for the Ryzen 6000 mobile series. While there has already been the graphics support to land, sensor support, and various other functionality, only coming now with the next kernel cycle will be Ethernet support.

Making a Sunday debut are the amd-pstate v6 patches as the latest iteration of this work for improving the AMD CPU frequency control behavior on Linux for more optimized power efficiency with modern Zen 2 / Zen 3 series (and future) processors.

AMD has made public the AMD Accelerator Cloud. No, they aren't getting into the cloud game per se, but rather allowing a place for customers to try out new EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators running with the latest ROCm software components.

AMD has issued a nice end-of-year update to the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler (AOCC) that also includes Fortran support as well as a new release of their AMD Optimizing CPU Libraries (AOCL).

Queued up as part of the x86/core changes intended for the Linux 5.17 cycle is dropping of the AMD 3DNow! code within the kernel. While 3DNow! brings back fond memories from the days of AMD's K6 and early Athlon processors, AMD deprecated the instructions a decade ago and no longer found in newer processors. Removing of the 3DNow! kernel code is being done as part of some code improvements.

AMD's Linux engineers continue preparing for next-gen EPYC server processors based on Zen 4 and supporting DDR5 memory.

AMD is preparing updates to their SMCA (Scalable Machine Check Architecture) driver code for future CPUs and points to processors having different bank layouts between CPU cores on the package.

AMD on Friday published a new version of their Advanced Media Framework "AMF" software development kit that enhances the multimedia processing capabilities for Radeon hardware.

Over the past year there has been a lot of work for getting AMD's suspend-to-idle "s2idle" support in order under Linux and the latest is a one-line code change expected to help at least some Ryzen laptops behave properly.

Sent out today was the fifth revision to AMD's new "amd-pstate" kernel driver focused on providing enhanced CPU frequency controls for Linux systems.

The latest Linux kernel patches confirm that next-gen AMD Zen processors are capable of featuring up to twelve CCDs.

A fourth iteration of the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver patches for Linux have been sent out for review and testing.

The Linux 5.17 kernel next year will support temperature monitoring for a "new generation" of AMD Zen processors.

Back in 2018 Intel founded Sound Open Firmware as their effort to provide an open-source audio DSP firmware and software development kit. AMD has begun supporting Sound Open Firmware too now, initially for the Renoir audio co-processor (ACP).

AMD released AOMP 14.0 during SC21 week as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang-based compiler providing OpenMP GPU offload support for Radeon graphics processors.