AMD Making It More Clear When Their RadeonSI OpenGL Driver Is Being Used

AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been around for a decade since the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics card days while finally the OpenGL renderer string is being changed to reflect "RadeonSI" as the name of the driver in use.

When using the RadeonSI driver and querying the OpenGL renderer, it's provided strings like "AMD Radeon Graphics (gfx1103_r1, LLVM 16.0.6, DRM 3.54, 6.5.7-300.fc39.x86_64)." But as you'll note, "RadeonSI" is not actually shown. Even though when using RadeonSI on Linux it's in use for Radeon HD 7000 series and all newer AMD graphics hardware since, besides cases like their legacy (proprietary) AMD OpenGL driver or using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver, the RadeonSI driver can basically be assumed.

But to avoid any user confusion, making it easier to grep logs, or any future cases like new OpenGL drivers in future generations of hardware, the RadeonSI OpenGL renderer string is finally adding RadeonSI. Better late than never and primarily useful for those wanting to script around glxinfo or similar for quickly checking the presence of the RadeonSI driver or not, should the need arise. The only surprising part is that it took a decade for RadeonSI to be explicitly added to the OpenGL renderer string.

The "radeonsi" is being appended prior to displaying the LLVM version in the OpenGL renderer string with Mesa 23.3. The change was merged today as part of a small set of AMD clean-ups prior to the imminent Mesa 23.3 branching / feature freeze. Mesa 23.3 stable will be out later this quarter.