A Big Batch Of AMD Graphics Driver Updates Just Sent Out For Linux 5.16

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Big Batch Of AMD Graphics Driver Updates Just Sent Out For Linux 5.16

Building off the earlier DRM-Next staged code from last month that brought initial DisplayPort 2.0 support and other feature work, another feature pull request was submitted today of additional AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver changes slated for Linux 5.16...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-More-For-Linux-5.16

[Developer12]

Does anyone know if there will eventually be a generic method of tunneling video for thunderbolt/USB4? I'm getting really fucking sick of all these motherboard-specific patch cables.

It works fine here because it's an APU and so you can feed the video output from the APU GPU to the on-die USB controller (along with PCIe). But the moment you stick in a GPU you're screwed. No way to route the GPU's output back towards the USB4 port unless your motherboard manufacturer does some really dumb hacky crap with an extra input port and some multiplexing.

In an ideal world we'd all use DRI PRIME instead. USB4 tunnels PCIe anyway and has to be attached to it, just make it a valid PRIME video sink and make sure enough PCIe bandwidth exists. Then any PCIe-attached GPU in the system (which is all of them) can DMA it's video frames to the USB4 controller and out they go. No patch cables. No fucky motherboard headers or board-specific pigtails.

No matter what combination of CPU, GPU, Motherboard, BIOS, or whatever you have, shit would just work.

PS. You might be wondering why I said "USB controller" and not "APU GPU" as the target. It's because thunderbolt cards exist, or rather could exist and not require shitty motherboard-specific connectors, if we had the ability to forward video to them over PCIe (in addition to actual PCIe to run the USB controller and be tunneled out).

At this point I'm tempted to go find the shittiest PRIME-capable PCIe GPU possible and market it as a thunderbolt-to-DP adapter. Just skip the video tunneling entirely.

[cb88]

Does anyone know if there will eventually be a generic method of tunneling video for thunderbolt/USB4? I'm getting really fucking sick of all these motherboard-specific patch cables.

It works fine here because it's an APU and so you can feed the video output from the APU GPU to the on-die USB controller (along with PCIe). But the moment you stick in a GPU you're screwed. No way to route the GPU's output back towards the USB4 port unless your motherboard manufacturer does some really dumb hacky crap with an extra input port and some multiplexing.

In an ideal world we'd all use DRI PRIME instead. USB4 tunnels PCIe anyway and has to be attached to it, just make it a valid PRIME video sink and make sure enough PCIe bandwidth exists. Then any PCIe-attached GPU in the system (which is all of them) can DMA it's video frames to the USB4 controller and out they go. No patch cables. No fucky motherboard headers or board-specific pigtails.

No matter what combination of CPU, GPU, Motherboard, BIOS, or whatever you had, shit would just work.

PS. You might be wondering why I said "USB controller" and not "APU GPU" as the target. It's because thunderbolt cards exist, or rather could exist and not require shitty motherboard-specific connectors, if we has the ability to forward video to them over PCIe (in addition to actual PCIe to run the USB controller and be tunneled out).

At this point I'm tempted to go find the shittiest PRIME-capable PCIe GPU possible and market it as a thunderbolt-to-DP adapter. Just skip the video tunneling entirely.

This is a very weird thing to get hung up on.... do you have thunderbolt only monitors or something (if so you must be have gotten ridiculously ensnared in that vendor lockin) yeah you heard me... vendor lock in. If you had any sense you'd have displayport monitors and not give a flying flip about thunderbolt because guess what you plug in a GPU it has displayport connectors 99% of the time. USB4 will be the closest we've been to be becoming vendor neutral and I am pretty sure Intel is still mucking with it.

[BingoNightly]

I'm getting really fucking sick of all these motherboard-specific patch cables.

Preach brother

[Quackdoc]

Does anyone know if there will eventually be a generic method of tunneling video for thunderbolt/USB4? I'm getting really fucking sick of all these motherboard-specific patch cables.

It works fine here because it's an APU and so you can feed the video output from the APU GPU to the on-die USB controller (along with PCIe). But the moment you stick in a GPU you're screwed. No way to route the GPU's output back towards the USB4 port unless your motherboard manufacturer does some really dumb hacky crap with an extra input port and some multiplexing.

In an ideal world we'd all use DRI PRIME instead. USB4 tunnels PCIe anyway and has to be attached to it, just make it a valid PRIME video sink and make sure enough PCIe bandwidth exists. Then any PCIe-attached GPU in the system (which is all of them) can DMA it's video frames to the USB4 controller and out they go. No patch cables. No fucky motherboard headers or board-specific pigtails.

No matter what combination of CPU, GPU, Motherboard, BIOS, or whatever you had, shit would just work.

PS. You might be wondering why I said "USB controller" and not "APU GPU" as the target. It's because thunderbolt cards exist, or rather could exist and not require shitty motherboard-specific connectors, if we has the ability to forward video to them over PCIe (in addition to actual PCIe to run the USB controller and be tunneled out).

At this point I'm tempted to go find the shittiest PRIME-capable PCIe GPU possible and market it as a thunderbolt-to-DP adapter. Just skip the video tunneling entirely.

I know this is the case for USB type-c and am Unsure if it is still the same with USB4 but I would assume so.

As far as I am aware you need a GPU for USB-C based displays universally, as the USB-C needs displayport IN to get video, (Or HDMI but I don't know of any device that chooses to do DP over HDMI, most USB-C to HDMI use DP->HDMI converters as it preforms better for a very minimal price) so a USB controller would need a dedicated GPU on board for this to be possible, The most simple solution would be to just start shipping all mobos with dedicated GPUs again LOL Jokes aside,

but the best solution is simply to buy a mobo that supports display out over USB-C and an APU system or for USB4 expansions cards to have native DP in, and for GPUs to start shipping an internal display port connector. but as far as I know there is no real way to get what you want without a dedicated USB-4 controller with a basic baked in GPU

[Developer12]

I know this is the case for USB type-c and am Unsure if it is still the same with USB4 but I would assume so.

As far as I am aware you need a GPU for USB-C based displays universally, as the USB-C needs displayport IN to get video, (Or HDMI but I don't know of any device that chooses to do DP over HDMI, most USB-C to HDMI use DP->HDMI converters as it preforms better for a very minimal price) so a USB controller would need a dedicated GPU on board for this to be possible, The most simple solution would be to just start shipping all mobos with dedicated GPUs again LOL Jokes aside,

I haven't the slightest ides what you're talking about. USB-C is a physical connector, not a USB standard. Are you talking about motherboards with a video input for their thunderbolt ports?

but the best solution is simply to buy a mobo that supports display out over USB-C and an APU system or for USB4 expansions cards to have native DP in, and for GPUs to start shipping an internal display port connector. but as far as I know there is no real way to get what you want without a dedicated USB-4 controller with a basic baked in GPU

No cards have DP in. They literally don't exist. You have to buy a card that has a special vendor-specific cable that connects to a header on the motherboard to piggyback on whatever the fuck it's using (either routing it from an APU or providing an input port).

Either way it's a hacky fucking mess when we could just be sending the video frames to the controller over PCIe.

[Developer12]

This is a very weird thing to get hung up on.... do you have thunderbolt only monitors or something (if so you must be have gotten ridiculously ensnared in that vendor lockin) yeah you heard me... vendor lock in. If you had any sense you'd have displayport monitors and not give a flying flip about thunderbolt because guess what you plug in a GPU it has displayport connectors 99% of the time. USB4 will be the closest we've been to be becoming vendor neutral and I am pretty sure Intel is still mucking with it.

Yeah, great. Let's just avoid using thunderbolt or USB4 for video. Forever. Who the fuck would ever want to use one cable for everything, like some kind of Universal......Serial......Bus? /s

It would actually be kind of handy having nothing but one kind of port to deal with, where every port can do whatever you want. Where the one cable driving your monitor can also supply the USB ports attached to it. Where plugging one cable into your laptop when you dock it can drive the monitors, and the keyboard, and ethernet, and everything else. Muse be some kind of fantasy world.

But we're not going to get there unless we get past this shitty design first. I can't believe nobody looked at this and didn't ask "well what if the video source changes? like they plugged in a GPU?" Either that or they did realize and decided to push ahead anyway using this ugly hack to get it out the door, expecting to just "fix" things in thunderbolt 4.0/USB 5.0 and leave this as a defective implementation.

yay! more USB fragmentation! /s Remember when we only had USB 2.0 and 3.0 to deal with?

[Quackdoc]

I haven't the slightest ides what you're talking about. USB-C is a physical connector, not a USB standard. Are you talking about motherboards with a video input for their thunderbolt ports?

I thought it obvious I was talking about using Display port alt, as that is the standard way to get DP out, to a USB-C monitor that accepts DP over it. I apologize for lack of clarification, but I didn't think it needed explained. whether it is USB4, Thunderbolt, or just USB 3.1 with DP alt mode, they mostly work the same way.

No cards have DP in. They literally don't exist. You have to buy a card that has a special vendor-specific cable that connects to a header on the motherboard to piggyback on whatever the fuck it's using (either routing it from an APU or providing an input port).

Either way it's a hacky fucking mess when we could just be sending the video frames to the controller over PCIe.

https://www.newegg.com/asus-90mc09p0...-048-_-Product mini DP in

https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-mode...0007-_-Product mini dp in

https://www.amazon.com/SUNIX-USB-C-E.../dp/B01MY4WRBU full DP in

I have a feeling you are completely oblivious to how USB-C DP alt-mode works thunderbolt compliant or not. As I said, you cannot do what you want, because you still need to convert the frames into a DP compliant stream, which happens in hardware, not within the OS. you NEED a GPU to do this, and while i'm sure there could be a super cheap gpu that could do this you cannot just "Shoot the frames to the USB-C controller" and have it display them, unless the USB-C has a GPU to deal with it. it does not matter if it is thunderbolt or not.

[Developer12]

I thought it obvious I was talking about using Display port alt, as that is the standard way to get DP out, to a USB-C monitor that accepts DP over it. I apologize for lack of clarification, but I didn't think it needed explained. whether it is USB4, Thunderbolt, or just USB 3.1 with DP alt mode, they mostly work the same way.

https://www.newegg.com/asus-90mc09p0...-048-_-Product mini DP in

https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-mode...0007-_-Product mini dp in

https://www.amazon.com/SUNIX-USB-C-E.../dp/B01MY4WRBU full DP in

I have a feeling you are completely oblivious to how USB-C DP alt-mode works thunderbolt compliant or not. As I said, you cannot do what you want, because you still need to convert the frames into a DP compliant stream, which happens in hardware, not within the OS. you NEED a GPU to do this, and while i'm sure there could be a super cheap gpu that could do this you cannot just "Shoot the frames to the USB-C controller" and have it display them, unless the USB-C has a GPU to deal with it. it does not matter if it is thunderbolt or not.

Those first two cards do indeed require the use of specific motherboards with proprietary patch cables.
The first:

ASUS Intel 500 series and later models with 14-1 pin Thunderbolt header.
*Refer to ASUS official website for an up-to-date list of compatible models

The 2nd:

The GC-TITAN RIDGE is compatible with GIGABYTE motherboards of that include a
Thunderbolt™ header on below: Intel
platform: Z390/H370/B360-series * Supported status may vary depending on motherboard specifications. *

The third card is interesting as it doesn't have any headers and I'm interested to see some comprehensive testing reviews to know how it works out. The amazon reviews are rather mixed in terms of compatibility.

I am definitely aware that you can tunnel lots of stuff over the various technologies using USB-C (USB4, thunderbolt, etc). However, just because you can pass DP over a type-C cable doesn't solve the problem of getting the DP into it in the first place. As mentioned above, what if I have a thunderbolt or USB4 port on a motherboard, but add a GPU? The GPU doesn't have a type-C port but I'd like to be able to tunnel the output of the GPU over the type-C cable. The only way I know of is motherboards (or cards) with a DP-in port, though this is the first time I've seen such ports on cards.

[Quackdoc]

Those first two cards do indeed require the use of specific motherboards with proprietary patch cables.
The first:
The 2nd:
The third card is interesting as it doesn't have any headers and I'm interested to see some comprehensive testing reviews to know how it works out. The amazon reviews are rather mixed in terms of compatibility.

I am definitely aware that you can tunnel lots of stuff over the various technologies using USB-C (USB4, thunderbolt, etc). However, just because you can pass DP over a type-C cable doesn't solve the problem of getting the DP into it in the first place. As mentioned above, what if I have a thunderbolt or USB4 port on a motherboard, but add a GPU? The GPU doesn't have a type-C port but I'd like to be able to tunnel the output of the GPU over the type-C cable. The only way I know of is motherboards (or cards) with a DP-in port, though this is the first time I've seen such ports on cards.

The internal headers solve multiple purposes, The first and foremost is to act as a lockout mechanic. thunderbolt cards can work in other mobos by jumping the connection. Next if video gets transfered over this header, it will still be displayport input, its just in form of a different connector, (probably eDP, but I don't have one to test right now). and finally some misc functions like DMA security.

The third card doesn't have any headers because it's not thunderbolt and doesn't need to be locked out. (QC seems to be shit though)

Most cards have these ports, and if they don't you could mod one to add them, its just a fact of vendors not locking down the cards and not using proprietary cords and cables, but assuming you know the pin outs, you can work around them.

so with that being said, the solution is using an Igpu with prime setup, or an internal connector. but you cannot just shoot the frames to the controller without a GPU. Now, I think onboard GPUs should be standard features again, even if they only serve as a video out with very basic 3d capabilites (Something like a GPU used in mobile phones.) as that would solve the problem, and IMO just a super useful feature all around.