AMD Working On Better Page Fault Handling For Navi / Vega GPUs

Longtime open-source AMD Linux driver developer Christian König on Wednesday sent out a set of patches providing "graceful" page fault handling support for Navi and Vega graphics processors.

This graceful page fault handling support is on their trek to providing recoverable page fault handling for newer Radeon GPUs with the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. This ultimately is for improving the behavior of applications/games to avoid hangs and/or invalid access messages being spewed to their dmesg and the like.

With this current batch of nine patches for the graceful page fault handling, Vega 10 is in good shape while Vega 20 and Navi is still being worked on. The amdgpu.noretry=0 module parameter also needs to be used plus relatively recent AMDGPU firmware files.

More details for those interested in this low-level graphics driver improvement can find the patches on the mailing list. Hopefully this better page fault handling support will be ready for introduction with the Linux 5.5 kernel merge window in early 2020.