AMD Submits Navi 12/14 & Arcturus GPU Support Code For Linux 5.4 Kernel Queue

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 7 August 2019 at 05:13 AM EDT. 12 Comments
RADEON
AMD sent in their initial pull request of feature changes to their AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver to begin queuing in DRM-Next for September's kick off the Linux 5.4 kernel cycle. Notable to this batch of AMDGPU DRM-Next work is a lot of new unreleased GPU support.

Unlike where the Navi 10 support landed in the mainline kernel after the AMD product launches, Navi 12 and Navi 14 GPU support is now ready to go and will be sitting in DRM-Next until the Linux 5.4 cycle begins. Of course, AMD could end up releasing Navi 12/14 products prior to Linux 5.4 stable going out as stable around November, but at least this support is available. We've also already seen Navi 12/14 happenings go on within the user-space OpenGL/Vulkan drivers and related code.

Navi 12 is expected to be a larger Navi graphics card that could potentially be launched as the Radeon RX 5800 series. Navi 14 meanwhile is rumored to be a more budget friendly 7nm GPU potentially as the Radeon RX 5600 series.

In addition to the Navi 12/14 kernel bits, this pull request also brings the initial Arcturus support code. Not much is publicly known about Arcturus but all indications from our digging through the code point to it being a new Vega-based workstation accelerator that is compute-only. We could potentially hear about Arcturus later this month at Hot Chips during a keynote by AMD CEO Lisa Su.

Beyond the new GPU support, this pull also has memory clocking dynamic power management now enabled for the existing Navi (10) support, scatter/gather display support for Raven hardware, improved SMU handling for GPU reset, RAS support for graphics, support for wiping memory on buffer release, and a variety of other feature work and bug fixes.

The bit for wiping video memory on release is interesting. The commit mentions that this memory allocation flag (AMDGPU_GEM_CREATE_VRAM_WIPE_ON_RELEASE) should be used for buffer objects with "sensitive data" and this TTM addition will ensure that the buffer gets cleared out when no longer needed rather than the contents remaining within memory that could potentially be read elsewhere.

This current list of AMDGPU kernel driver changes can be found via this DRM-Next PR. Expect more AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature work to come about over the next few weeks for Linux 5.4, which will be the last stable kernel cycle release of 2019.
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