In addition to Linux 5.15 adding a new AMD audio driver for "Van Gogh" APUs such as found in the forthcoming Steam Deck, AMD's open-source Linux driver engineers have also been working on other audio improvements -- this time on the Chromebook front.
AMD News Archives
1,663 AMD open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
AMD this morning announced a goal of increasing the energy efficiency of EPYC processors running AI training and high performance workloads by 30x... Within the next four years.
While the Linux kernel still hasn't added any formal control yet for AMD Predictive Store Forwarding to disable it short of also toggling Spectre V4 / SSBD, with the Linux 5.16 kernel the AMD PSF bit will now be exposed to KVM guest virtual machines so that they -- either with a patched/future kernel or for other operating systems -- may choose to toggle explicitly disable this AMD CPU feature.
Earlier this month AMD published their "amd-pstate" Linux driver that leverages ACPI CPPC data to make more informed CPU frequency scaling decisions with an aim to boost the performance-per-Watt for Zen 3 (and eventually Zen 2) processors on Linux. The second spin of that "amd-pstate" Linux kernel driver is now available for testing.
As reported at the start of August, AMD and Valve have been working on Linux CPU performance/frequency scaling improvements with the Steam Deck being one of the leading motivators. As speculated at that time, their work would likely revolve around use of ACPI CPPC found with Zen 2 CPUs and newer. Published last week was that AMD P-State driver for Linux systems indeed now leveraging CPPC information. AMD formally presented this new driver yesterday at XDC2021.
Of all the great stuff for AMD in Linux 5.15, one of the patches still not having yet been mainlined is the control support around Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) with Zen 3 processors. It's been six months since AMD published their security whitepaper around PSF while the Linux patch has yet to be mainlined while now it seems will be updated for a reduced focus on KVM usage.
While working on my usual Linux kernel feature overview that summarizes the many articles over the past two weeks outlining all of the new features and changes merged, one area that particularly stands out for Linux 5.15 are all of AMD's upstream contributions that happened to make it in this kernel. There is a lot of new enablement on the AMD side -- both for CPUs and Radeon graphics -- but also improving existing hardware support.
At last! AMD has posted the Linux kernel driver patches for their new "AMD-PSTATE" driver! This driver with modern AMD Zen CPUs (initially limited to Zen 3) to achieve greater performance per Watt / power efficiency on Linux than the conventional ACPI CPUFreq driver.
A new kernel patch series was posted this morning working on AMD Branch Sampling "BRS" support.
Going back to September 2019 was work on the AMD PTDMA driver for supporting this controller found on modern AMD processors for high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. With the Linux 5.15 cycle the AMD PTDMA driver is finally being merged to the mainline kernel.
Since last year AMD has been working to get its s2idle / suspend-to-idle S0ix sleep state code in order for supporting this lowest power platform idle state on newer AMD laptops and there has also been other AMD suspend/resume improvements in recent times. Now with the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle is an important fix for the AMD s2idle code.
Here should hopefully be a great indication about AMD's Linux efforts moving forward with one of their recent and exciting hires at the company.
The work I initially wrote about last week for AMD optimizing their C3 entry handling to avoid an unnecessary cache flush will now be picked up for the upcoming Linux 5.15 kernel cycle.
AMD engineers continue working on preparing the Linux kernel for the Frontier supercomputer.
AMD has published their fifth revision of SEV-SNP support for the KVM hypervisor and guest VM support for this Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging functionality found with new EPYC 7003 series server processors.
A minor optimization was posted by an AMD engineer on Wednesday for the Linux kernel.
With the Radeon RX 6600 XT review embargo lifted and the cards set to hit retail channels this week, the Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 driver has been released in now officially supporting the RX 6600 series.
Future AMD CPUs -- potentially AMD EPYC 7004 "Genoa" -- will be supporting 5-level paging.
The latest AMD SEV work happening to the Linux kernel for benefiting EPYC servers with virtualization is the new "sev_secret" module for allowing guests to access confidential computing secret areas.
One of the AMD patch series that has been in the works for more than one year is the PTDMA driver providing pass-through DMA engine support on Linux. The driver is now up to its eleventh revision but the mainlining might happen soon.
AMD continues pushing new code out for Linux in better exposing their platform's capabilities in the open-source world. The latest AMD driver work now queued via "-next" branches for introduction this autumn in Linux 5.15 is SB-RMI sensor support.
Along with other optimizations to benefit the Steam Deck, AMD and Valve have been jointly working on CPU frequency/power scaling improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on modern AMD platforms running Linux.
AMD engineers today published their latest code drop of the AMDVLK official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems.
AMD earlier this week quietly published a new version of its AOCC code compiler that is now rebased against the upstream LLVM/Clang 12.0 compiler state.
Early work is underway on Coreboot for AMD's Barcelo as the successor to Lucienne.
AMD's PMC Linux driver with Linux 5.15 is expected to offer more debugging information for diagnosing S0ix power states behavior to analyze if an AMD SoC is hitting or not the desired low-power states.
After AMD posted FidelityFX Super Resolution last month with various initial launch titles, the source code to this NVIDIA DLSS alternative is now publicly available.
Landing into "hwmon-next" just after the Linux 5.14-rc1 tagging that marks the formal end to feature work for the current cycle was the k10temp driver adding support for AMD Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring under Linux.
Thanks to one of VMware's Linux engineers there are improvements pending to the AMD IOMMU support code to help with performance.
Since last year AMD has been working on VanGogh APU support for Linux initially with their graphics driver support and that has spread to other areas. It also turns out now that with VanGogh APUs will be a new Linux audio driver.
AMD engineers and their partners continue work towards upstreaming Secure Encrypted Virtualization's Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) support for the mainline Linux kernel.
As part of our various Q2'21 and H1'21 Linux/open-source recaps, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news so far this calendar year.
The latest public code patches on the mailing list today are preparing for newer AMD heterogeneous servers that will have Aldebaran GPU nodes connected via xGMI links to the CPU(s) and the GPU dies in turn having HBM2 memory.
Linux's KVM virtualization component previously could allow a virtual machine guest relying on AMD SVM virtualization to breakout into the host. This bug persisted in the Linux kernel from late 2020 to March 2021 before being addressed and is the first known issue of such a guest-to-host breakout that didn't also depend upon bugs within user-space components.
There's the next chapter to the unfortunately rather sad state of the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver support under Linux.
It's been three months since AMD published a security whitepaper outlining the possibility of a side channel attack with PSF. The Predictive Store Forwarding functionality is new to AMD Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000 / EPYC 7003 series) processors and as part of their security analysis they are allowing users the ability to opt-out of using this feature in the name of greater security but the feature still hasn't been picked up for the mainline Linux kernel.
Google engineers have prepared a set of Linux kernel patches allowing for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) / SEV-ES encrypted state to allow for local migration support of these encrypted virtual machines on the same host.
Published all the way back in September 2019 was a Linux driver for supporting the Pass-Through DMA controller for EPYC processors. The PTDMA hardware allows for high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. Now mid-way through 2021 that AMD PTDMA Linux driver remains in the works and is up to its tenth driver revision while waiting to see if it's now ready for mainline or further changes are still deemed necessary.
Often times when checking out thin clients and industrial PCs / IoT units from OnLogic and other industrial PC vendors, they tend to be Intel powered and within the forums the first question is often about any AMD equivalent... For those wondering about any new AMD-powered thin clients / mini-ITX systems within an aluminum chassis, OnLogic has introduced the TM800.
It looks like AMD's rising marketshare in the data center is paying off as AMD is hiring more Linux kernel engineers.
Announced last year by AMD was SmartShift Technology for laptops with both AMD CPUs and GPUs to allow dynamically shifting the power budget between the CPU/GPU depending upon the current workload. AMD promoted SmartShift as delivering up to 14% extra performance and now this technology is being worked on for their Linux driver.
Frontier as the first US exascale supercomputer being commissioned by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. while being powered by AMD CPUs/GPUs is in the process of seeing more Linux kernel changes for bringing up the new platform.
It's been a month and a half since AMD published a security analysis of their new Zen 3 "Predictive Store Forwarding" feature that while helping performance could theoretically lead to a new side-channel attack. While they published a Linux patch to allow disabling PSF if desired for increased security, to this day they remain in the works and have yet to be mainlined.
While past the Linux 5.13 merge window, some reorganizing/cleaning to the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) code was merged to mainline today to make it easier for when the SEV-SNP and other feature code is submitted for Linux 5.14 or later.
AMD has published initial open-source Linux graphics driver code for a new GPU dubbed Beige Goby.
AMD has published a set of patches refactoring their MCE kernel driver, making various machine check architecture (MCA) address translation updates in preparing for "future systems" while at the same time finally introducing Data Fabric 3 support for EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors and newer.
While last minute AMD Zen 3 "znver3" improvements managed to make it for GCC 11 that was recently released, the recent debut of LLVM 12.0 wasn't so lucky on the Zen 3 support front. There was the very basic enablement that landed in LLVM 12 but now the more complete support isn't expected until LLVM 13 this autumn.
As part of AMD's growing HPC focus and maturing of their Radeon Open eCosystem GPU compute stack, they ended out this week by making public a prototype implementation of CRIU support for ROCm.
While a lot of new features and improvements have been accumulating for the Linux 5.13 kernel with the ongoing merge window, one of the unfortunate aspects of this new kernel is that the AMD Zen CPU energy driver "amd_energy" is indeed being removed.
As a surprise and big disappointment, the "amd_energy" driver that exposes AMD EPYC server CPU energy monitoring metrics under Linux for being able to calculate the per-core and package power consumption and more is now set to be removed from the mainline Linux kernel.
1663 AMD news articles published on Phoronix.