AMD User Queue Mesa Support Merged For Linux - Submitting Work Directly To The GPU

After an exciting day yesterday of Vulkan 1.4 driver support arriving in Mesa 25.0 drivers, there is more exciting code that was merged today for Mesa 25.0: the AMDGPU code now allows for user queue support on the latest Linux kernels for submitting rendering work directly to the GPU hardware.

The user queue support for the AMD RadeonSI driver allows for job submission directly to the GPU hardware without needing to go through the AMDGPU kernel driver command submission ioctl. In turn this can allow for a latency and efficiency win with job submission directly to the GPU hardware and avoiding some of the kernel driver overhead.

With the code merged today, the user queue support is only utilized with the "AMD_USERQ=1" environment variable is set and running on a supported Linux kernel.

This AMD user queue support has been successfully tested with running the GNOME Shell in the user queue mode as well as running benchmarks like Unigine Heaven and the simple glxgears.

The merge request had been open for the past seven months and materialized across 24 patches. This support will be part of Mesa 25.0 due out in mid-Q1 as stable. It will be interesting to see the impact ultimately that this user queue support brings to Linux gamers and the like.