AMD Publishes AMDGPU UVD Firmware For Southern Islands

Recently AMD posted UVD video decode support for GCN 1.0 with the AMDGPU driver, one of the long holdouts for letting the AMDGPU DRM driver approach feature parity with the longstanding Radeon DRM driver that is the default for GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs. That AMDGPU UVD GCN 1.0 decode support is going into the Linux 5.9 kernel later this summer after years ago Radeon driver developers largely dismissed the efforts of porting the UVD decode capability for these original GCN graphics cards over to AMDGPU.

One of the reasons that this wasn't possible previously was AMD hadn't published the necessary firmware binaries for GCN 1.0 UVD that were compatible with the AMDGPU driver and just for the older Radeon DRM driver. But hitting linux-firmware.git today are those firmware files.

With linux-firmware.git paired with Linux 5.9+ are now all of the necessary bits for enjoying UVD-based video acceleration in conjunction with the Gallium3D video acceleration code in user-space. This commit adds the AMDGPU-compatible UVD files for Oland, Pitcairn, Tahiti, and Verde GPUs.

Also today AMD landed the Vega 20 TA firmware that previously was missing from this firmware repository. They also updated the other AMDGPU firmware files against the latest binaries shipped by the recent Radeon Software 20.20 driver package.