AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Amassing Improvements For Linux 5.8

While the Linux 5.7 merge window just ended on Sunday, with the DRM-Next cutoff for new material coming weeks prior to that, AMD developers working on their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver already have over 200 patches accumulated for the next cycle.

AMDGPU+AMDKFD kernel driver work continues at full-speed with continued work especially on Navi and Arcturus. More work is expected over the weeks ahead but some of the material queued so far into their amd-staging-drm-next branch includes:

- Landing of the new AMDGPU Trusted Memory Zone functionality. TMZ offers optional encrypted video RAM functionality including a new user-space API for creating the encrypted buffers. At the moment the functionality is disabled by default unless setting amdgpu.tmz=1 as the module parameter. AMD Radeon hardware supports TMZ of families Raven, Renoir, and Navi 10/12/14.

- Enabling the new VCN mode (VCN 2.5 DPG) for Arcturus.

- A new ABM driver implementation for Ambient Backlight Management for new hardware in transitioning from the DMCU to DMCUB (that is the Display Microcontroller Unit B with Renoir).

- 4K virtual display support.

- A new firmware share memory support mode for VCN.

- Enabling support for IH rings 1 and 2 with Navi.

- Updating SPM golden settings for Navi 10 / 12 / 14.

- AMD Raven and Renoir are now added to the whitelist of hardware supporting peer-to-peer DMA for P2PDMA support between GPUs.

- Various other Arcturus and Navi updates.

The Linux 5.8 kernel should see its merge window in June and then releasing as stable in August. Depending upon how the Linux 5.8~5.9 cycles play out, 5.8 could end up being the kernel shipped by the likes of Fedora 33 and Ubuntu 20.10. Stay tuned for our ongoing monitoring of feature development work destined for Linux 5.8.