AMD Announces The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" For Advanced Linux Desktop Features

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 22 January 2025 at 10:12 AM EST. 42 Comments
AMD
An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers... The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities.

The AMDGPU Composition Stack is a fork of Wayland's Weston compositor and this is where AMD engineers will be experimenting with "additional advanced features" as a staging area for their Wayland features they hope to see adopted by Weston and other Wayland compositors. ACS will also serve as "a reference compositor for AMD's advanced graphics and display feature development." This Wayland compositor is also designed to "extract the best out of AMD Display and Graphics [hardware]."

The AMDGPU Composition Stack isn't just some one-off playground for AMD Linux engineers but they note that it's to be a "full stack opensource delivery vehicle for AMDs commercial solutions and products." Furthermore their release announcement this morning calls it "To be the space where AMD specific in-house SW tools (performance tweakers, multimedia players, 3D games, profiling tools etc) can be saved in future."

Presumably AMD is investing in the AMDGPU Composition Stack to help further their efforts along with the Steam Deck and other AMD Linux powered handheld gaming devices, the wins that AMD has been enjoying for powering various in-vehicle infotainment systems that typically run on Linux, and other similar applications.

The ACS Wayland Compositor code is hosted on GitLab and was announced this morning on the DRI mailing list.

Here's a screenshot from AMD showing off their initial AMDGPU Composition Stack:

AMDGPU ACS


It will be interesting to see what innovations AMD engineers work on driving around Wayland to complement their open-source Linux graphics/display stack. The ACS feature page lists some of its features as VRR/FreeSync, MPO support using underlays, direct multimedia decode, color management with wide gamut, full screen HDR video playback with tone mapping, and multi-seat support. Some planned features include more around color management / HDR, windowed HDR playback, TMZ and Secure Display, virtualization support, a custom QEMU implementation, and more.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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