AMD Sends Out HDCP Support, New GPU Support In AMDKFD For Linux 5.5

In addition to Intel this week sending out their first big batch of graphics driver changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle kicking off at year's end, today AMD developers sent in their first batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes targeting this next version of the Linux kernel.

On the AMD front they too have been working on a lot of interesting bits for Linux 5.5. The highlights of this first of several pull requests over the next few weeks include:

- Initial HDCP support. Yes, High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. This HDCP Linux support on the Radeon side is coming for Raven Ridge and newer. As explained in that aforelinked article, it's likely due to AMD APUs coming to more Chromebooks and so all-in can be viewed as a good thing. For those not wanting HDCP support, the AMDGPU DC implementation does allow disabling it as a Kconfig option.

- Continued work on RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) for Vega 20.

- AMDGPU will now reserve vRAM for page tables instead of trying to evict.

- GPU reset fixes, including GPU reset support for the Renoir APU.

- PowerPlay power management improvements.

- Support for MSI-X.

- The AMDKFD compute driver code now supports Navi 12/14 as well as Renoir. For Navi, we still are waiting to see the user-space compute bits in the form of ROCm support.

More AMDGPU changes for Linux 5.5 are still coming over the next few weeks. The Linux 5.5 cycle will formally kick off around the end of November while it will reach stable in early 2020. The list of changes for this initial AMDGPU DRM-Next-5.5 pull via this mailing list post.