Southern Islands Support Will Come To AMDGPU On Linux 4.9

One month after the first AMDGPU feature pull of new functionality for DRM-Next to in turn land in Linux 4.9, the second feature pull request has now been sent out and it presents experimental Southern Islands (GCN 1.0) support for AMDGPU.

As has been expected for a while, the Southern Islands hardware (a.k.a. GCN 1.0 / HD 7000 series) will be experimentally supported by this AMDGPU DRM driver. This Southern Islands support will be disabled by default and must be configured at the kernel's build-time via a Kconfig switch. This is similar to the still-experimental GCN 1.1 support in AMDGPU.

With this S.I. support, the AMDGPU DRM driver is capable of supporting all GCN GPUs. This is good news for those ultimately wanting Vulkan support, AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver usage for OpenCL/OpenGL, and the other benefits of the improved design of AMDGPU DRM over the mature Radeon DRM. But keep in mind this needs to be enabled via a Kconfig switch and most Linux distributions will continue using GCN 1.0/1.1 on Radeon DRM for the near future at least. This AMDGPU SI support also requires using the latest Mesa and xf86-video-amdgpu DDX Git code too.

Besides this new pull request having AMDGPU SI support, it also has various TTM memory management clean-ups, run-time power management fixes, S3/S4 suspend fixes, power improvements, and other code clean-ups and optimizations.

The complete list of changes with this 4.9 AMDGPU secondary pull request can be found here. Notably absent from this pull request and not being readied for Linux 4.9 is AMD's big DAL rework of its display abstraction code.