AMD Posts Linux Graphics Driver Patches For New IP Blocks - Presumably For RDNA4

AMD engineers on Monday posted a few new patch series for enabling some updated IP (intellectual property) blocks within their open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver. This new IP is presumably part of the ongoing hardware enablement work for their next-generation RDNA4 graphics.

As part of AMD's block-by-block enablement strategy for their open-source Linux graphics driver employed the past few years of enumerating GPU IP independently by each engine/block, it's more difficult to ascertain the correlation between a particular IP block version and product in advance of product launches. But on Monday AMD sent out patches for enabling ATHUB 4.1, LSDMA 7.0, IH 7.0, and HDP 7.0.

This follows recent work by AMD engineers on GFX1200 enablement in LLVM for their GFX12 graphics hardware for RDNA4 and other ongoing enablement work that given the timing is fairly safe to assume is for RDNA4 as the next-generation Radeon graphics.

ATHUB 4.1 is needed for clock-gating / power management features, LSDMA 7.0 is the latest IP for Light SDMA for general purpose System DMA (SDMA) on the GPU, IH 7.0 for the Interrupt Handler on the GPU, and HDP 7.0 for the Host Data Path support for CPU accessing the GPU device memory via the PCI BAR. As far as code changes, the big chunks of the work are from the auto-generated header files.

The big version bumps for these IP blocks all the more are likely indicative of these bits being for next-gen RDNA4 as opposed to further iterating on RDNA3 or similar.

Given the timing of these latest AMDGPU kernel driver patch series, this new support will likely be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.9 merge window, which in turn will be out as stable around the middle of the calendar year.