AMD Linux Driver Bringing BACO Support To Older Sea Islands / Volcanic Islands GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Linux Driver Bringing BACO Support To Older Sea Islands / Volcanic Islands GPUs

It's fairly rare these days seeing big patch sets out of AMD focused on improving the open-source Linux driver support for the likes of aging GPUs such as the Sea Islands and Volcanic Islands generations, but this Friday there is some notable development activity...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Linux-BACO-CI-VI

[skeevy420]

Dammit if I'm not craving TACOs now. Ohhh....Bacon Taco. BACO.

Thanks for inspiring my breakfast AMD and Phoronix.

[Haxk20]

This will really help battery time on my laptop since i have polaris dGPU in here and its always on running at lowest clocks. If the chip can power off then it will be amazing.

[stormcrow]

Really wish it wasn't so rare... But AMD is a corporation and they have a bottom line to think about. No corporation is ever truly a "friend". Interests just happen to coincide with your own for a while.

It's good news for those with that generation of card, which is no doubt still quite viable for many tasks. I myself have an even older HD 4830 in my Sandy Bridge box because it's still better than the awful IGP (kinda sad ain't it?). Would be nice to have those generations of cards (HD 4xxx - HD 9xxx) cards to get more loves.

[agd5f]

This actually is for power savings. See my follow up patch series:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2019-October/041123.html

[shmerl]

When is GPU reset coming to Navi?

[ezst036]

Which if any apus will be affected by these? Does this go back as far back as kabini temash and kaveri? Or is this only for GPU cards?

[agd5f]

Which if any apus will be affected by these? Does this go back as far back as kabini temash and kaveri? Or is this only for GPU cards?

Only dGPUs. APUs don't support BACO. APUs generally have more aggressive power gating features so different blocks on the GPU are powergated dynamically to save power rather than powering off the entire GPU as is done with BACO.

[schmidtbag]

Oh cool. Wasn't expecting this, but it's a welcome change.

It's good news for those with that generation of card, which is no doubt still quite viable for many tasks. I myself have an even older HD 4830 in my Sandy Bridge box because it's still better than the awful IGP (kinda sad ain't it?). Would be nice to have those generations of cards (HD 4xxx - HD 9xxx) cards to get more loves.

Your GPU came before AMD gave Linux any real attention. They still have a long way to go with GCN, let alone RDNA. It's not realistic or fair to expect them to cater to a GPU that's over a decade old.
I figure once the modern drivers are fully up to the OpenGL and Vulkan spec, there's a lot less they'll be distracted by, at which point who knows, maybe they will have the time to focus on r600.

[Guest]

This actually is for power savings. See my follow up patch series:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...er/041123.html

Cool! Hopefully it doesn't break the driver for Hawaii again, and hopefully it won't be left in an unusable state for months.