Tiling Support For AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver

As a potential performance-boosting addition, the "RadeonSI" Linux driver for open-source support of the AMD Radeon HD 7000/8000 series graphics cards now has patches for supporting tiling.

Jerome Glisse of Red Hat published the necessary patches for providing initial tiling support with the "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver that supports the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" series and beyond.

Supporting tiling in RadeonSI involves changes to the Radeon Linux kernel DRM (likely for merging into the Linux 3.10 kernel), libdrm, and the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. The RadeonSI Mesa patch can be found here and then other patches on dri-devel.

While the RadeonSI tiling patches have yet to be tested at Phoronix, if you're curious about the potential performance benefits, check out the Radeon Gallium3D R600g Color Tiling Performance results and An Optimized Open-Source Driver Tries To Compete With AMD Catalyst.