Linux 5.10 Graphics Driver Changes From AMDGPU DC For GCN 1.0 To Continuing RDNA 2 Push

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 15 October 2020 at 06:06 AM EDT. 15 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
The direct rendering manager (DRM) driver updates were sent in overnight for the ongoing Linux 5.10 merge window with a range of improvements for these graphics/display drivers and as usual the Intel and AMD Radeon driver churn is particularly heavy.

Highlights of the DRM driver updates for Linux 5.10 include:

- The Intel "i915" driver now supports synchronization object timeline support as can be used by their Vulkan driver. The execbuf2 extension mechanism is also in place.

- Tiger Lake HOBL support is now enabled as a "Hours of Battery Life" feature. But at the same time frame-buffer compression (FBC) support for Tigerlake has been disabled until some issues are sorted out.

- Display additions for next year's Rocket Lake desktop processors building off Gen12.

- The AMDGPU driver continues working on RDNA 2 graphics card support with Sienna Cichlid and Navy Flounder after that first-cut Radeon RX 6000 series support was merged into Linux 5.9.

- DC display support for GCN 1.0 / Southern Islands GPUs. With that and the UVD support that came in Linux 5.9, the AMDGPU driver is in quite good shape for these original AMD GCN graphics cards. But for now the hardware is still defaulting to the older Radeon DRM driver instead. One of the last blockers to AMDGPU driver becoming the default is that DC doesn't support VGA/analog display connections that were still used by some GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards and thus wouldn't work with AMDGPU DC at this time.

- AMDGPU also now supports PCIe DPC recovery and other improvements.

- The old Radeon DRM driver finally is exposing the shader clock speed via sysfs.

- The MSM DRM driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware now has per-process GPU pagetable support, DisplayPort output abilities, and other work.

- Raspberry Pi VC4 support.

- Matrox G200 desktop graphics card support.

- A Cadence MHDP8546 DisplayPort bridge driver is the sole new driver this cycle.

The full list of DRM changes via this pull request.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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