AMD Posts Linux Driver Patches For New VPE & UMSCH Components With Future GPUs

Following AMD recently posting Linux graphics driver patches for enabling a GFX 11.5 graphics engine and new DCN 3.5 display block that are presumably for an RDNA3 refresh such as for the Ryzen 8000 series APUs, today AMD posted additional open-source driver patch series for enabling additional new IP.

First up, today's new AMD Linux driver patches enabling a brand new engine type called VPE. VPE is to serve as a new copy engine with future AMD GPUs. VPE is simply described in the new patches as:

"VPE is a new general purpose copy engine. It supports a variety of scaling and transform features.

Mesa code will be available shortly to utilize this."

There are 21 patches amounting to 7.3k lines of new code albeit a big chunk of that is header files. VPE 6.1.0 is the initial VPE copy engine version to be supported. VPE in this context stands for the Video Copy Engine although it's advertised as a general-purpose copy engine. Yes, like the other AMD GPU IP blocks the VPE too will require additional firmware.

Also out today are patches enabling VCN 4.0.5 as a new version of Video Core Next for accelerated video encode/decode as well as JPEG coding. Some of the patches tie VCN 4.0.5 as with IP version 11.5, so it does appear today's patches or at least the Video Coding Next portion are in relation to RDNA3 refresh parts. But given the timing presumably VPE is also coming for this refresh step.

Also out today is the UMSCH 4.0 IP support. The UMSCH block is responsible for scheduling of multimedia queues. UMSCH is also a brand new block and stands for the User Mode Scheduler for multi-media.

The common theme out of the dozens of new driver patches today are on the multimedia/video front... With the new VPE and UMSCH blocks, it's looking like multimedia upgrades will be a big focus for these RDNA3 refresh parts that presumably will be the next-gen APUs/SoCs. It's nice as always seeing this open-source, upstream-focused Linux GPU driver work being prepared for the Linux kernel early and well in advance of the hardware launch so that by the time such products ship there should be nice out-of-the-box Linux support.