GCN 1.0 / Southern Islands On AMDGPU Takes Another Step Forward

Many Phoronix readers appear excited about the forthcoming GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" support for the AMDGPU DRM driver as an alternative to the Radeon DRM. With the newer AMDGPU DRM support will eventually mean Vulkan and AMDGPU-PRO support for these original Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs. This GCN 1.0 / SI support has taken another step forward with now having "workable" dynamic power management.

For a few weeks the AMDGPU SI support has been getting ready to roll and might still land for Linux 4.9 albeit as an experimental build-time kernel option just like the existing GCN 1.1 preliminary support in AMDGPU. The AMDGPU winsys changes for Southern Islands have already landed in Mesa and the Southern Islands PCI ID additions for xf86-video-amdgpu have also been prepped.

One of the remaining items being tackled now for Southern Islands is DPM (Dynamic Power Management) support and it looks like that too may be squared away. AMD developer Huang Rui published a set of 14 SI DPM patches. He says that with these patches the Southern Islands hardware should now have "workable" support. Good news for being able to get sufficient performance if opting to use the experimental AMDGPU SI support.