Radeon News Archives

AMD has added support for another RDNA 3.5 refresh variant to the Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems.

AMDVLK 2024.Q4.2 is out today as the newest official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver release for Linux systems.

Last week ROCm 6.3 was announced on the AMD Community Blog with a set of nice enhancements to this open-source GPU compute stack. While some good additions, when the announcement went live ROCm 6.2 software was still showing up as the latest and the open-source code via GitHub wasn't yet reflecting ROCm 6.3... That changed today.

After an exciting day yesterday of Vulkan 1.4 driver support arriving in Mesa 25.0 drivers, there is more exciting code that was merged today for Mesa 25.0: the AMDGPU code now allows for user queue support on the latest Linux kernels for submitting rendering work directly to the GPU hardware.

Either due to a mistimed blog post or other factors, a big feature article is out talking up the new ROCm 6.3 features... But the updated ROCm 6.3 open-source GPU compute software doesn't appear to actually be released yet at all their usual sources. In any event there are new features and big performance gains being talked up for ROCm 6.3.

Following the Linux 6.13 DRM feature pull this week that brought many new open-source kernel graphics driver features, it's now time to further stabilize that new feature code with fixes. Sent out today were a batch of fixes for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver code targeting the early Linux 6.13 state. In addition to fixes though is also allowing the AMDGPU Display Core "DC" code to build properly on LoongArch hardware for allowing recent AMD Radeon GPUs to work on these Chinese systems.

Sent out yesterday was an AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver pull request with the last few feature additions and patches slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. Alongside other AMD kernel graphics driver updates, the new driver code with Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards will finally allow controlling the zero RPM fan feature under Linux.

While old Radeon GFX6/GFX7 era graphics processors are no longer actively supported by AMD on Windows and haven't been for quite a while, under Linux with the upstream open-source driver stack they remain supported and still enjoying improvements in large part from common code. The most recent fascinating aspect is the old AMD GFX6/GFX7 era GPUs seeing official Vulkan 1.3 support that has been deemed conformant by Khronos.

AMD ROCm 6.2.4 is out today as the newest point release for this Radeon and Instinct open-source GPU compute stack.

The upcoming Mesa 24.3 graphics driver stack will deliver a very nice performance win with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for aging RDNA1 "GFX10" graphics processors.

With the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release there is a huge improvement coming for those using the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver with the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 sample app.

One month has passed since the AMDVLK 2024.Q3.3 driver release while today has brought the AMDVLK 2024.Q4.1 release with a few new Vulkan API extensions.

A new patch posted today for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver is introducing a "cleaner shader" explicitly for GFX11.0.3 GPUs like the Radeon 780M integrated graphics to help ensure that there is sufficient data isolation between different workloads running on the GPUs. The motivation isn't clear if there is some GFX11.0.3 security vulnerability, some AMD Linux customer particularly concerned about security on said GPUs, or some other motivation for focusing this latest cleaner shader work on GFX11.0.3 hardware.

DRM_Panic is the functionality first added in Linux 6.10 for "Blue Screen of Death" type functionality when a kernel panic occurs or similar for displaying a nice graphical error message. Since the initial introduction it's been extended to handle QR code error messages, monochrome logos, and other customization options. The AMDGPU driver has new patches available for expanding the DRM_Panic support to all DCE/DCN-based graphics cards.

A big batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel graphics and compute driver updates were mailed in for DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

The OpenCL 3.0 compute specification has been out in finalized form since September 2020. Since then NVIDIA's official Windows/Linux drivers have been exposing OpenCL 3.0 going back to 2021, the Intel Compute Runtime stack has also been exposing OpenCL 3.0 support for years, and even with Mesa's Rusticl open-source OpenCL implementation it's beginning to see Gallium3D drivers with conformant OpenCL 3.0. Yet if installing the AMD ROCm compute stack right now, you'll see OpenCL 2.1. But it looks like OpenCL 3.0 will soon be here for ROCm.

Last week at XDC 2024 in Montreal was a status update on AMD's GPU compute virtualization support around their open-source Linux GPU driver and ROCm compute stack.

Last week at the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC2024) in Montreal there was a talk showcasing Mesa's open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver running atop Windows 11.

It looks like for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle there could be a nice performance boost for AMD Radeon discrete graphics cards with the AMDGPU kernel driver poised to set more aggressive power heuristics by default.

Red Hat engineer Jocelyn Falempe has been working to sort out DRM Panic support for the AMDGPU driver. The DRM Panic infrastructure is useful since it's what allows presenting a panic screen, a.k.a. a "Blue Screen of Death" type experience when running into major kernel problems. With Linux 6.12 there's now the ability to show QR codes for error messages with DRM Panic.

An open-source developer at AMD has carried out a DOOM port that runs almost entirely atop AMD GPUs for rendering and the game logic. This DOOM GPU port relies on the AMD ROCm library with the LLVM libc C library for offloading the classic DOOM to the AMD GPU.

AMD today released AMDVLK 2024.Q3.3 as their latest open-source Vulkan API driver for Linux systems prior to ending the quarter.

It's been just one week since the release of ROCm 6.2.1 while today ROCm 6.2.2 was released.

AMD's GPUOpen team has released HIP RT 2.4 as the newest version of this open-source ray-tracing library built atop their HIP interface.

Following the AMD ROCm 6.2 release from early August, ROCm 6.2.1 was released on Friday evening as the first point release to that series for this AMD GPU compute stack for Linux systems.

AMD today made public their RDNA 3.5 instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for these updated RDNA3 graphics found within new Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" APUs thus far.

Following the weekend news of the AMDGPU kernel driver becoming too large that it's causing the Plymouth boot splash screen on slower Linux systems to time-out, longtime AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olšák expressed a new idea for helping to reduce some bloat from this AMD kernel graphics driver.

The modern AMD kernel graphics driver "AMDGPU" is the biggest driver within the mainline Linux kernel and is approaching six million lines of code albeit a large chunk of that is made up of auto-generated header files for each supported GPU. But this AMDGPU kernel driver is becoming "really really big" that it's beginning to cause issues for Plymouth that commonly provides the initial boot splash screen experience on modern Linux desktops.

AMD today committed their GC 11.5.2 firmware to the upstream linux-firmware.git for the necessary firmware binary blobs needed for hardware initialization by their open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver with this newer RDNA3.5 variant.

We are just a week or two out from the start of the Linux 6.12 merge window and AMD has submitted a final round of feature updates to DRM-Next of kernel graphics driver changes they want to round out AMDGPU/AMDKFD for this next cycle.

Sent out today were the DRM fixes for 6.11-rc7 ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc7 kernel being released on Sunday. As usual most of the changes revolve around the AMDGPU and Intel i915/Xe drivers plus random fixes to the smaller drivers. There is one change though with the AMD Radeon graphics driver side worth highlighting to address a performance regression affecting recent kernels.

Following the AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 driver release from earlier in the month, AMDVLK 2024.Q3.2 is now available as the latest update to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems.

A big set of patches have been submitted for DRM-Next of "new stuff" to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and the AMDKFD compute driver with the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle.

With Mesa's RADV driver supporting Vulkan Video for accelerated video encode/decode using this cross-platform, industry standard API it hasn't been exposed by default for RDNA3 graphics processors bearing VCN4 IP. That has now changed for Mesa 24.3 when using the latest VCN4 firmware.

It's not too often these days seeing new OpenGL extensions come to Mesa drivers given their already robust coverage and not many new OpenGL extensions being introduced compared to the still-expanding Vulkan APIs. Overnight though RadeonSI Gallium3D saw GL_KHR_shader_subgroup support land.

A set of a dozen patches have reworked the video encode handling within Mesa 24.3 for the Video Acceleration (VA) front-end and the RadeonSI/VCN driver code. This rework aims to enable new features moving forward, enhance the overall driver, and bring "significant" memory savings for H.265/HEVC video encoding.

The Vulkan Video support within Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver continues to be improved upon. The newest addition now found in the code for Mesa 24.3 is enabling 12-bit AV1 content accelerated decoding.

A set of patches posted today on the AMD graphics driver mailing list begin implementing support for process isolation within the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

Hitting the release button minutes ago, AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 is available as the newest version of AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver and the first new release since the end of June. This driver continues to trail in popularity to the likes of the Valve-backed Mesa RADV Radeon Vulkan driver but does well in areas like Vulkan ray-tracing and is officially backed by AMD.

Back in February of this year you may recall the interesting news that was announced on Phoronix that AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source. That open-source ZLUDA code for AMD GPUs has been available since AMD quit funding the developer earlier this year. But now the code has been retracted. It's not from NVIDIA legal challenges but rather AMD reversing course on allowing it to be open-source.

A number of GPU hang fixes have been merged for AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver within Mesa. These fixes should help further enhance the current RDNA3 GPU driver support and also has fixes for stabilizing the upcoming RDNA4 GPU support.

AMD engineers posted a set of patches today for enabling VCN IP DUMP support with their open-source AMDGPU kernel driver. This allows for dumping the IP state of all Video Core Next (VCN) hardware from VCN 1.0 through VCN 5.0.

Last August I wrote an article about the open-source AMD GPU kernel driver crossing 5 million lines of code -- including their overzealous header files -- and following the recent Linux 6.11 merge window curiosity got the best of me with how much larger the kernel driver is now that the initial RDNA4 support is merged... Well, it's about to cross 5.8 million lines, or about a 16% increase just over the past year.

As expected, AMD has released ROCm 6.2 as the newest version of their open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon graphics cards and Instinct accelerators. ROCm 6.2 is a big update with several new software components, improving the existing PyTorch and TensorFlow support, and a variety of other enhancements as AMD works to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA.

As I noted in yesterday's AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 review and in particular the new RDNA3.5-based Radeon 890M graphics, I used updated DMCUB firmware with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack to workaround some screen freezes and kernel errors initially experience while using the Linux 6.10 kernel. That updated DMCUB firmware is now public within the upstream linux-firmware.git repository for those that may be picking up a new AMD Ryzen AI laptop with RDNA3.5 graphics in the coming days.

While the hope remains that GPU resets are a very infrequent task, AMD Linux driver engineers have recently been working on the ability to support a per-queue GC reset capability for more precise reset capabilities when needed.

The latest video acceleration improvements to report on with the open-source AMD Radeon driver front is support in Mesa 24.3-devel for passing HDR metadata in the AV1 encoder.

We appear to be on the heels of the AMD ROCm 6.2 software release for advancing the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack with new features.

It looks like the AMD RDNA4 "GFX12" graphics driver support is in good shape: AMD is now enabling the driver support for the next-generation graphics "out of the box" with the latest pending patches.

While there have been various efforts like HIPIFY to help in translating CUDA source code to portable C++ code for AMD GPUs and then the previously-AMD-funded ZLUDA to allow CUDA binaries to run on AMD GPUs via a drop-in replacement to CUDA libraries, there's a new contender in town: SCALE. SCALE is now public as a GPGPU toolchain for allowing CUDA programs to be natively run on AMD graphics processors.