Libdrm Picks Up Support For AMD Navi

As another one of the prerequisites for landing the AMD Radeon RX 5000 series "Navi" support in Mesa, the libdrm bits have just been merged.

Libdrm is the Mesa DRM library that is needed for sitting between the Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) interfaces and the user-space components (depending upon the driver, as is required by like RadeonSI). Libdrm also ends up being used by the DDX drivers like xf86-video-amdgpu and other components as well depending upon the driver. As of a short time ago, the Navi bits landed in libdrm Git.

The Navi support here isn't all that exciting and mostly boilerplate code for a new generation for a new family ID, a new member for a tile steering override for GFX10, GDDR6 as a new video memory type, and the largest addition is simply the new tests for VCN 2.0 video decode support.

So it's really quite small as is usually the case on the libdrm side and nothing like the 459 patches so far to the Linux kernel for the AMDGPU kernel driver, dozens of patches so far to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end, or the likely thousands of lines of new code for bringing up the RadeonSI Gallium3D support that is imminent. There will also be work still on the AMDVLK side for their official Vulkan driver and in due course the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver support.

Stay tuned for our continued open-source Navi driver coverage leading up to launch-day benchmarks on 7 July.