AMD Readies Linux Driver For Another Entry-Level RDNA2 "Beige Goby" Card

It looks like AMD is preparing for another low-end/entry-level Radeon RDNA2 graphics card, given their latest open-source Linux graphics driver code.

Following the big set of graphics driver patches sent in earlier this week for Linux 5.19, two secondary pull requests of AMDGPU changes were submitted on Thursday to the DRM maintainers for inclusion in Linux 5.19. These pulls are much smaller than the main batch of feature changes that included a lot of work on preparing for next-gen RDNA3 graphics cards.

This pull on Thursday includes link training fixes, hot-plug fixes, various GFX9 Vega and GFX10 RDNA/RDNA2 fixes, and other mostly fixes and clean-ups. But there is also "add new PCI [device ID]."

That new PCI device ID added is another Beige Goby card for entry-level RDNA2/Navi2.

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is one of the current "Beige Goby" GPUs.

The new Beige Goby device ID added is 0x7424 and is on top of the existing Beige Goby IDs of 0x7421, 0x7422, 0x7423, and 0x743F. I haven't seen this Radeon PCI ID of 0x7424 mentioned elsewhere and the patch adding this new device ID doesn't cite any bug report or existing product, so it doesn't appear to be a device ID that was previously forgotten about for adding but rather some new/unreleased variant. Beige Goby is the Linux-targeted colorful fish codename for what became known as Navi 24.

The Radeon RX 6400 is another existing "Beige Goby" graphics card that has already been supported on Linux since prior to launch.

So we'll see what comes of another Beige Goby card whether AMD ends up launching some further cut-down Radeon RX 6300 (already rumored though possibly is already in the kernel as one of the other unused Beige Goby PCI IDs like the RX 6300M) or a possible RX 6450/6550 XT "refresh" type card in the future. In any event this new Beige Goby ID is being added to the Linux 5.19 kernel.

Separately, there was also another pull of AMDGPU material sent out on Thursday and that is adding the AMDGPU_GEM_CREATE_DISCARDABLE flag. Mesa 22.2 recently added support for using this new discardable flag for GEM memory management. This allows the behavior where evictions from the dedicated video memory are discarded under memory pressure rather than trying to preserve and copy it over to slower system memory.