AMD Sends In ASPM Support, FreeSync Fixes For Linux 5.13 Cycle

On top of the prior AMDGPU feature pulls for Linux 5.13 that brought Aldebaran support, FreeSync HDMI, and other improvements, another round of updates were sent in on Friday.

Given that the Linux 5.13 merge window is kicking off next week and the time for new "feature" updates to DRM-Next has already passed, this latest AMDGPU pull request is primarily about bug fixes. There are fixes for the new Aldebaran accelerator support, addressing eDP issues, some VanGogh APU problems have also been taken care of, Renoir SMU problems addressed, and also some FreeSync fixes too.

Squeezing into this pull request though is also ASPM support, as in the PCI Express Active State Power Management functionality. As written about earlier this month, AMD is finally ready to enable ASPM for Navi 1x GPUs to help in lowering the GPU power consumption. ASPM allows for the PCIe link to be powered down or placed in a low-power state when there is no activity on the bus. The power savings for both mobile and desktop tend to be worthwhile aside from quirky hardware/drivers having exit latency issues.

What's now sent as part of this pull request isn't only Navi 1x but also patches to enable ASPM for Vega and Polaris too. So long story short, this should allow some modest power-savings for these newer generations of GPUs with the Linux 5.13+ state. It's long overdue but at least finally on the horizon.

This work was sent in via this PR for DRM-Next.