Navi 10 Code Lands In Mesa 19.2 For RadeonSI Ahead Of Radeon RX 5700 Series Launch

Last week I wrote about Navi (10) support pending for the RadeonSI OpenGL driver to complement the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver support for the Radeon RX 5700 series currently queued into DRM-Next for Linux 5.3. That OpenGL driver support has been now been merged into Mesa 19.2 for debuting as stable around the end of August for providing open-source OpenGL on these next-gen AMD GPUs.

Now that there was the libdrm 2.4.99 release as a prerequisite for adding the Navi family bits, AMD developers merged the RadeonSI support for these forthcoming graphics cards. The Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT will be launching on 7 July and you will be able to find launch-day Linux benchmarks on Phoronix.

It's important to note that this Mesa Navi support is just for RadeonSI. The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver continues to be independently maintained by the community and developers from the likes of Red Hat and Google. It will likely be some time after launch before Navi support arrives in RADV as it doesn't appear AMD seeded those "community" developers with any hardware in advance. AMD also has not yet posted any Navi patches for their official AMDVLK Vulkan driver yet (nor ROCm OpenCL), so for launch day there might just be OpenGL benchmarks, but we'll see.

The good news now though is that indeed pre-launch there is Navi support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Mesa 19.2. Mesa 19.2 is expected to enter its feature freeze at the start of August and ideally (but perhaps not realistic, given recent cycles) release as stable around 27 August so there is still a few weeks for potentially seeing Navi RADV support land and optimizations to RadeonSI support. The timing of the Mesa 19.2 release should work out fine considering Linux 5.3 with its Navi support won't likely debut as stable anyhow until early September. The good news is these key components should make it into the likes of Ubuntu 19.10 and Fedora 31 for out-of-the-box support.