Radeon Open-Source Linux Graphics Have A Wild Day For Mesa 19.3 From 8K Decode To ACO

With Mesa 19.3 scheduled to be branched today and that marking the end of feature development for this next quarterly installment to these open-source Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, developers are in a mad rush landing last minute improvements. The open-source Radeon driver support has a lot to stand in particular from today's work.

Hitting Mesa 19.3 today so far has included:

- ACO is now ready for Navi. There has been a lot of work on Valve's "ACO" AMD compiler in recent weeks for Navi/GFX10 hardware while now it's ready when using the RADV_PERFTEST=aco switch to enable this alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end.

- RadeonSI Gallium3D now exposes 8K video decode support for HEVC and VP9. However, this 8K decode support is limited to next-gen Renoir APUs and moving forward. Current hardware is limited still to 4K.

- RadeonSI has disabled SDMA for GFX10/Navi. Due to open bugs around the system DMA bits for Navi, the RadeonSI driver has disabled the functionality to help with stability. There have been recent bug reports of Navi OpenGL hangs and disabling SDMA seems to be the sanest workaround for the time being.

- Not Radeon specific, but thanks to Intel Mesa now exposes ARB_gpu_shader_int64 in the OpenGL compatibility context.

- VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore is now supported by RADV for the important Vulkan timeline semaphore functionality.

- Cleanups around the new RADV secure compile functionality.

Mesa 19.3 should be branching soon followed by weekly release candidates until ready. If all goes well Mesa 19.3.0 will be out before the end of November otherwise early December if facing the usual bug difficulties.