AMD Is Still Contributing Code To Linux

Many Linux users have been mad over AMD closing down its Operating System Research Center resulting in many AMD Linux open-source developers losing their jobs. Last week I wrote that ultimately it shouldn't be too worrisome for Linux users wanting to use AMD processors and chipsets on Linux and this still looks to be the case.

In last week's exclusive article I shared that AMD employees out of California, Texas, and India would likely be picking up the slack that's left by the closure of AMD's Dresden OSRC office that did much of the interesting and experimental AMD CPU enablement for Linux. Last week were even new compiler patches for AMD's future Steamroller CPUs on Linux (bdver3). Due to AMD's financial hardship, they may be doing less experimental and non-core Linux enablement, but they're still around.

As a sign of this, new AMD patches for Linux have been flowing this week. Boris Ostrovsky, an AMD "Senior Member of Technical Staff", has been contributing. Ostrovsky has been at AMD since 2007 and was with the Operating System Research Center but is based in the United States and still on AMD's active roster. Today he sent out a small patch for the Family 16h microcode and he's also still working on QEMU concerning AMD's virtualization support. "Update QEMU's knowledge of CPUID bit names. This allows to enable/disable those new features on QEMU's command line when using KVM and prepares future feature enablement in QEMU."

As already mentioned, the AMD open-source graphics driver team is also not affected by the recent layoffs.

AMD might not be as strong as Intel with their large-staffed Open-Source Technology Center, but they're still striving to improve their product support on Linux.