AMD Cleaning Up RadeonSI Linux Driver Code Ahead Of Next-Gen GPU Enablement

There's been a number of patches quietly landing for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by AMD engineers in making various clean-ups and appearing to prepare for future adjustments to the driver in eventually extending the support beyond the current RDNA3 "GFX11" graphics hardware.

There's been a number of patches being reviews from ac,radeonsi: cleanup and code restructuring, small functional changes. The description for that merge request is rather peculiar and likely a hint towards future hardware:

"This is mostly a cleanup to get ready for a distant future."

No comments elaborating on what the distant future holds.

Reviewed patches from that merge request have been landing such as via MR 26095. If looking at the code changes, there is some renaming going on to add "gfx11_" to some functions, some adjustments to "GFX11" conditional statements, and other cleaning likely ahead of ushering in new hardware enablement code for the RadeonSI driver and the AMD common code (AC) within Mesa.

There isn't any new GPU support patches posted yet. But with AMD already having merged GFX11.5 support into Mesa drivers for what is expected to be the RDNA3 refresh hardware in APUs, it's quite possible this is early preparations in the direction of Navi 4 / RDNA4 (presumably with a "GFX12" graphics block). AMD has been doing a good job preparing for future GPU hardware support in advance prior to announcing the products via their modern block by block strategy as a replacement to their prior colorful fishy patch process.