AMD Sends Out New Linux Patches As Part Of Their Next-Gen GPU Support

A few patch series were fired off yesterday for enabling new IP blocks on upcoming Radeon graphics processors.

As written about a few months ago, AMD is using a new approach for enabling their new GPUs under Linux whereby rather than sending out big patch series with colorful fish codenames, they are sending out individual patch series bringing up individual IP blocks of the GPU at a time.

This new "block-by-block" enablement strategy goes along with their AMDGPU driver work on adopting IP-based device enumeration and relying less on hard-coded driver values. What this ultimately means is the AMDGPU driver is more adaptable for future GPU designs but also benefits them by making it more difficult for new hardware product secrets to be exposed early on by the Linux patches -- rather than large monolithic patch series laying out the support, there are just a lot of individual patch series bringing up the different blocks that may or may not be all for one particular GPU given the AMD engineers are often working on supporting multiple variants at a time.

By sending out the smaller patch series over time, it also makes it easier for AMD to clear the legal/technical review procedures for getting the code published. So ultimately it's a win for all sides albeit makes things less newsworthy for other outlets without big patch series marked by fun codenames.

In Linux 5.18 they sent out more enablement of new IP blocks and other patch series recently. This work is building up for the "RDNA3" next-generation gaming GPUs later this year as well as GFX940 as AMD's next-gen Instinct accelerator.

On Wednesday were another few more IP block patch series. NBIO 4.3 as an updated version of their "New Bus IO" IP block for handling device interactions with the PCI Express bus on GPUs. The NBIO header file alone for the new version is another 82k lines of code for the AMDGPU driver.

IH 6.0 as the latest IP for their GPU's Interrupt Handler.

HDP 6.0 as the new version of their Host Data Port IP for interfacing from the CPU to vRAM (PCI BAR).

SMUIO 13.0.6 as the newest version of their System Management Unit IO for vBIOS ROM access and other functionality.

Depending upon the reviews/timing, these new blocks may see them in the upcoming v5.19 kernel cycle.