AMD Radeon Graphics Get Many Changes For Linux 3.17

Among the exciting work to be found for the AMD Radeon graphics kernel driver in Linux 3.17 include:
- Good Hawaii support for the AMD Radeon R9 290 series. The R9 290/290X should now work with the open-source driver at long last, but besides Linux 3.17 you'll need newer microcode files and also the latest Gallium3D code. Once 3.17-rc1 has been tagged, I'll move ahead with my open-source Radeon Hawaii benchmarks on the R9 290.
- Support for a new firmware format to make updates easier to manage.
- Dynamic Power Management (DPM) is now enabled by default on more GPUs. DPM is being re-enabled by default for Cayman and BTC hardware.
- GPU VM improvements.
- Support for uncached and write combined GTT buffers.
- Userptr support. The user pointer support allows turning a memory pointer supplied by user-space into a buffer object for the DRM kernel graphics driver. Userptr can be used for GPGPU/compute scenarions and other situation for feeding memory objects from user-space to the kernel driver.
- Various other fixes and improvements.
The full listing of Radeon DRM changes lined up for the Linux 3.17 merge window can be found via the DRI development list.
12 Comments