AMD Continues Posting New Patch Series For Next-Gen RDNA3 GPUs

In addition to the recent notable Linux patch series enabling GFX11 graphics and VCN4 video encode/decode for next-generation "RDNA3" GPUs, AMD this week has been posting some additional patch series enabling other intellectual property (IP) blocks for their next-generation hardware.

As part of AMD's new approach with IP-based enumeration and "block by block" patch series for bringing up the GPUs, this week has saw a number of additional patch series submitted. These patch series don't reveal a lot of exciting details about the hardware and difficult to peg down specific SKU configurations due to the different IP block versioning, but in any case it's great seeing these patches flowing out of AMD early -- months ahead of launch.

Navi 3x GPUs aren't expected to launch until the back half of the year. Given the timing of these patch series, if reviews and a pull request is sent into DRM-Next in the past week or so, it's possible we will see much of these enablement patches land for the Linux 5.19 kernel. The 5.19 merge window opens up around the end of May while the stable kernel will be out in July. But more than likely some of the next-gen AMD open-source GPU support will carry over to the Linux 5.20 (or Linux 6.0, depending upon Torvalds' versioning preference this time) and thus possibly not be in a stable kernel until September~October. That hits the chances though of not finding out-of-the-box RDNA3 support in the autumn Linux distribution releases like Ubuntu 22.10 or Fedora 37 (though at least with the latter come updated version kernels with time). So we'll see how well this new IP-based enumeration strategy helps their at-launch / out-of-the-box support depending upon when AMD exactly launches these wares for consumers.

In any event the latest AMD enablement patches worth mentioning for their open-source AMDGPU kernel driver include:

- MMHUB 3.0.2 as the Multimedia Hub

- NBIO 7.7 as the newest version of their New Bus IO block for the GPU's interface to the PCI (Express) bus.

- HDP 5.2.1 support for the Host Data Port for providing CPU access to the frame-buffer via the PCI BAR.

- UMC 8.11 as the latest version of the memory controller IP.

- SMU 13.0.7 as the latest minor update to the system management unit for handling the GPU power management tasks.

- A lot of extra SMU 13.0.0 patches for the system management unit.

AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver work continues. So far much of this apparent work for RDNA3 has been focused on the AMDGPU kernel driver while soon we'll likely begin seeing more of the Mesa side patches at least for RadeonSI.