Radeon On Linux 3.8: Minor For Now, New Code Coming

Alex Deucher of AMD emailed in a pull request on Friday afternoon for the Radeon graphics driver that will end up as part of the DRM pull for the Linux 3.8 kernel.

This pull request isn't too exciting. Deucher describes it as a "pretty minor -next pull request." However, he then noted that they are obtaining clearance at AMD to release some new open-source code. "We some additional new bits waiting internally for release. Hopefully Monday we can get at least some of them out. The others will probably take a few more weeks."

What is this forthcoming code waiting to see the public spotlight? Could it be future (Radeon HD 8000 series) early hardware support? Finally some UVD video playback bits? Improved power management? Better performance? We'll need to wait and see.

As far as the minor highlights of this pull request, there's support for ELD registers for passing audio information to sound hardware, handling of GPUVM page faults more gracefully, and miscellaneous fixes.

The Friday pull request to go into drm-next can be found on the DRI-devel mailing list.