Linux 6.3 Will Better Handle Missing AMD Radeon Firmware / Unsupported Hardware

Another batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature code was submitted this week to DRM-Next as additional AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver changes slated for Linux 6.3.

Notable this week is picking up the patches by AMD's Mario Limonciello around reworking the firmware request handling so it happens earlier in the driver initialization phase. The intention here is to handle it before losing the system BIOS console if any firmware is missing for the dfferent IP blocks making up the Radeon GPU. The aim is to improve the process on Linux around new AMD GPUs on Linux to avoid a messy user experience if there is missing hardware support or the necessary firmware blobs for hardware initialization.

In addition to that set of 45 patches to rework the firmware handling, this week's AMDGPU update also has various fixes, code clean-ups, and some SMU13 fixes to help the Radeon RX 7000 series (RDNA3) hardware. There are also several fixes for the AMDKFD compute driver.

The full list of AMD kernel graphics driver patches for the week can be found via this pull request. The Linux 6.3 merge window will be opening up in mid-February when this work in DRM-Next will land along with many other Direct Rendering Manager driver enhancements.