AMD Sends Out New Linux Patches For RDNA3 "GFX11"

AMD continues working on their open-source Linux driver support for next-gen GPUs... The latest patches posted on Friday are for "GFX11", pointing to the major new graphics IP version with RDNA3 graphics processors due out later this year.

AMD continues bringing up their new unreleased GPU support in a new "block by block" approach rather than the large, lofty patch series as with prior generations. As noted this has a number of benefits for improving their development workflow and making it easier to get the patches out there in a timely manner ahead of launch.

The latest excitement to note with their latest patch series is the introducing of the "GFX11" block. GFX9 was Vega/CDNA and GFX10 is for Navi 1x/2x (RDNA / RDNA2) while GFX11 is now almost definitively for RDNA3. The latest patches for ending out the week begin introducing the open-source driver support for GFX11.

AMD began landing patches inside the LLVM compiler for the "GFX11" target for their AMDGPU shader compiler back-end. AMD then moved on with beginning to post AMDGPU kernel driver patches around GFX11.

The GFX11 headers were posted and add 24.6k lines to the driver right there. There were then 73 patches sent out on Friday for enabling the MES - Micro Engine Scheduler. The new AMD Micro Engine Scheduler (MES) is a hardware scheduler micro-controller for scheduling engine queues to hardware slots. Following that were another 29 patches for enabling the graphics and compute support for the new GC 11.0 block that goes along with the MES engine management.

The open-source Linux driver enablement work for RDNA3 GPUs is certainly heating up and getting to the more interesting code drops. No super exciting details though were revealed by this latest series beyond confirming RDNA3 is ushering in GFX11 as opposed to another GFX10 rev. If all goes well there will be upstream support in the Linux kernel and Mesa for RDNA3 GPUs ahead of the graphics cards launching later this year - stay tuned as the enablement work continues and my monitoring of the Linux support state.

Sent out on Friday was also another pull of readied material for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel merge window at the end of May. Notable with that pull is enabling the SoC21 block but besides that is more IP-discovery work and other fixes and low-level code improvements.