AMDGPU Adding Support For DRM's Buddy Allocator In Linux 5.19

Going back to last October has been work by AMD developers in leveraging the DRM buddy allocator code started by Intel within their AMDGPU kernel driver. With the Linux 5.19 kernel this summer, AMDGPU is ready to finally make use of that buddy allocator.

Intel started work on the DRM page-based buddy allocator as part of their dGPU efforts for dividing of video memory into equal parts (buddies) and continuing equal splitting that until able to satisfy the memory request. It started out being i915 driver specific but then worked its way into the core DRM common area so it can ultimately be re-used by other Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager drivers. After the AMDGPU support patch went through a dozen rounds of review, it's now ready for mainlining and was sent to DRM-Next this week by way of drm-misc-next.

AMDGPU buddy allocator support is the most prominent change as part of today's drm-misc-next PR but there is also HDMI support for the Ingenic driver, writeback fixes/improvements for the Broadcom / Raspberry Pi VC4 driver, and other improvements.

The Linux 5.18 development cycle is still young so look for more Linux 5.19 DRM-Next material to keep building up over the next few weeks.