AMD Begins Posting More KFD Patches For Discrete GPUs

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 9 December 2017 at 09:00 AM EST. 19 Comments
RADEON
For the past number of months AMD has been working on upstreaming more KFD changes, AMDKFD is their kernel driver to the HSA compute stack. AMD began with upstreaming their APU changes while now they have finally moved onto their "dGPU" changes.

Longtime AMD Linux developer Felix Kuehling has sent out a set of 37 patches today of initial discrete GPU changes for the upstream AMDKFD HSA kernel driver.

These changes are about the discrete GPU topology and initialization. Felix noted, "This patch series adds support for dGPU topology to KFD and implements everything needed to initialize KFD on dGPUs. This is still missing dGPU memory management APIs, so it's not going to be able to run any user mode tests yet. But device information about CPUs and supported dGPUs should be reported correctly in /sys/class/kfd/kfd/topology/nodes/*."

These latest patches can be found on amd-gfx. He noted in the series that this is his last patch series for the year due to holidays. These dGPU changes should be queued up for DRM-Next / Linux 4.16, but given he won't be sending out anymore patches the next few weeks, this is possibly the only dGPU KFD improvements we'll find in Linux 4.16 given the timing. Thus we're likely waiting until at least Linux 4.17 before seeing any working dGPU AMDKFD support in good shape for user-space.
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