AMD Sends In More Radeon "Navi 2" Updates For Linux 5.10 Kernel

AMD's open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver developers have sent in their first round of updates to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.10 kernel merge window kicking off in October.

This is the first of several pull requests expected of new feature material slated for Linux 5.10. Following all of the Navy Flounder and Sienna Cichlid enablement that hit Linux 5.9, there continues to be a lot of patches still coming in for these "Navi 2" GPUs expected to launch soon. As it stands now Linux 5.9 + Mesa 20.2 (and LLVM 11.0) is the base requirement it seems for Navi 2 but given the continued patch churn we'll see how well Navi 2 works on Linux 5.9 or if 5.10 ends up being a better baseline.

Linux 5.10's merge window will open up in October while the actual stable Linux 5.10 kernel won't be out until the tail end of 2020 or early next year depending upon how the cycle plays out. Anyhow, for what's in this first pull request there is:

- Updates for "Sienna Cichlid" and "Navy Flounder" as the Navi 2 / GFX10.3 parts that are forthcoming. Among the updates for this initial Linux 5.10 pull request are firmware handling updates, updating of the golden register settings, a reset handling change, and enabling of a new "MP0" dynamic power management feature for Sienna Cichlid.

- A bit concerning is this pull request does disable run-time power management for Navy Flounder. The actual patch simply notes, "Disable runtime pm for navy_flounder temporarily." As of this pull request the runtime power management is disabled for Navy Flounder alongside Sienna Cichlid but hopefully any bugs leading to it being disabled will be addressed ideally prior to the Linux 5.10 merge window.

- There is also a golden register settings update for Arcturus.

- DCE6 / Southern Islands support for the DC display code. This improves the display capabilities for the original GCN 1.0 hardware for those wanting to use the "AMDGPU" DRM kernel driver rather than the default Radeon DRM driver. The lack of DC support was one of the areas where AMDGPU lagged behind for GCN 1.0. There has been efforts to switch GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs over to AMDGPU kernel driver by default but is held up by VGA analog output support in AMDGPU DC. Those with Southern Islands (or Sea Islands) hardware wanting to switch to AMDGPU can boot their system with "amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1 radeon.si_support=0 radeon.cik_support=0" to make the switch.

- A rework of the pre-OS vRAM reservation handling during the driver initialization process.

- Performance state fixes.

- Support for plane rotation.

- Voltage and power hardware monitoring interfaces are now exposed for Renoir.

- Fixes for manual fan control handling.

- Various other display updates.

The list of patches can be found via dri-devel.