Newer AMD Radeon Graphics Cards Now Work On RISC-V With Linux 6.10

Andrew Morton sent out more patches on Wednesday that have been pulled into the Linux 6.10 kernel. Notable from this latest round of "non-MM" updates is enabling more compiler warnings by default and getting newer AMD GPUs working on the RISC-V architecture.

Enabling newer AMD GPUs to work on RISC-V beginning in Linux 6.10 is kernel mode FPU support for RISC-V being merged.

The AMDGPU Display Core "DC" code for driving display support with newer AMD GPUs having Display Core Next (DCN) hardware requires floating point support. With RISC-V now having basic kernel mode FPU support, the AMDGPU display driver code should be working properly now starting on Linux 6.10. Older AMD Radeon graphics cards not relying on the newer display driver code have already been working out just fine on RISC-V such as shown in the prior SiFive HiFive Unmatched benchmarking. Unfortunately though there's still a limited number of RISC-V boards available with PCI Express x16 slots especially at an enthusiast price point.

This is great news though that all the newer AMD Radeon graphics hardware should now be running fine on RISC-V with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. There is optional support for AMDGPU DC with Polaris and similarly older ASICs but has been in use for Vega and newer GPUs.

In addition to tthe RISC-V kernel-mode FPU and a cross-architecture kernel-mode FPU API, the patches sent in by Andrew Morton on Wednesday also include a patch series for enabling more compiler warnings by default.

The new compiler warnings being enabled by default include -Wextra, -Wrestrict, -Wformat-truncatiuon, and -Wcast-function-type-strict. Upstream kernel developers already worked to address the fallout uncovered by these compiler warnings up to now.

See this pull request for more details on these latest patches that have been picked up for the Linux 6.10 merge window.