Radeon For Linux 3.19 Picks Up DPM Fixes, Better TTM Performance

While AMD's new GPU kernel driver isn't coming for Linux 3.19, another pull request has been sent in for the current Radeon DRM driver and it offers up a few last minute enhancements.

The drm-next merge window is closing in the days ahead but Alex Deucher of AMD sent in another round of updates prior to David Airlie cutting off the 3.19 drm-next merge window ahead of the official Linux 3.19 merge window that will open next month.

The new Radeon drm-next 3.19 pull request has TTM performance improvements and CI DPM fixes. The dynamic power management changes for the newer AMD hardware includes reworking the thermal setup, fixing the memory clock VDDC configuration for Hawaii GPUs, fixing shader clock DS enablement, fixing the default DPM state setup, fixing the DPM MC initialization for certain Hawaii boards, PowerTune fixes for Hawaii GPUs, and a number of other changes. This pull request also has some TTM performance optimizations done by Michel Dänzer.

The dynamic power management fixes are great, especially for users of the Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics cards. It will be interesting to see in our usual benchmarks if there's any performance benefits of the TTM memory management optimizations.

The pull request outlining all of the changes can be found via this mailing list post. Alex also mentions that there's a number of GPUVM improvements that should be ready next week as well for merging.