AMD Begins Staging AMDGPU Patches For Linux 4.20/5.0, Including FreeSync Refactoring

With the DRM feature work for Linux 4.19 now in the kernel, AMD's stellar open-source driver team has begun staging their work-in-progress changes for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver for the next kernel cycle.

There is now drm-next-4.20-wip as part of AMD's development Git tree of the Linux kernel for Radeon/AMDGPU development. That's for "Linux 4.20" that will almost surely be renamed to "Linux 5.0" given Linus Torvalds' expressed versioning preference of bumping the major kernel version once hitting that number equal to all of his fingers and toes.

Among the code staged so far is a refactoring of some FreeSync kernel code, HDR display handling updates, enabling of stereo display mode with DAL3, support for a 2nd UVD instance for the upcoming Vega 20 GPU, AMDGPU DC display code updates that appear to fix a few bugs, power-gating support for Stoney, and various other code improvements and clean-ups.

While this tree has some FreeSync code refactoring, there still is the big missing piece of the puzzle for FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync on the fully open driver stack... The user-space bits. There's been on and off discussions about properly supporting FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync with a uniform user-space API by the different graphics drivers. Those discussions seem to happen every few months but unfortunately with no solid outcome. As of writing, I'm not aware of any consensus having been reached on the user-space bis. Perhaps this could finally get squared away next month at XDC2018. But until those user-space bits are floated and land, FreeSync unfortunately isn't a reality on Linux besides in the AMDGPU-PRO bits.

We'll see what else comes to this AMDGPU Linux 4.20~5.0 tree in the weeks ahead. Let us know in the forums what else you would like to see tackled by the AMDGPU driver in the near future.