AMD Posts Initial Patches For Raven APU Support: 117 Patches, 314k L.O.C.

Alex Deucher of AMD has posted the initial AMDGPU DRM/KMS kernel driver patches for bringing up graphics on the next-generation "Raven" APUs.

Raven Ridge is expected later this year as the first Zen-based APUs. These DDR4-supported Zen APUs are expected for release in Q4 but there have been some indications it might happen a bit earlier. Raven Ridge graphics make use of AMD's new Vega architecture, which an APU in the form of Zen+Vega should be quite exciting if the price and performance are on point.

While Vega has already been enabled in AMDGPU, the Raven (Ridge) support published today adds in 314,946 lines of code across 117 patches. The vast majority of the new code though (almost 200k LOC) is in the form of header files for the registers.

The patches do confirm there is a new ACP audio with Raven Ridge as well as a new media block (VCN) that appears to replace UVD and VCE. At least initially there is just one PCI device ID for Raven Ridge graphics: 0x1002. Like Vega, the Raven Ridge graphics support depend on the DC (DAL) code.

The initial Raven graphics patches can be found on the mailing list. Hopefully we'll see these patches primed for Linux 4.13 so that there is good open-source graphics driver support by the time these APUs ship late in the year -- and hopefully we'll see DC finally land in 4.13 too.