RadeonSI Gets Some Tidying Ahead Of Navi/GFX10 Support (Radeon RX 5700 Series)

Well known open-source AMD developer Marek Olšák sent out a set of eight RadeonSI Gallium3D patches this morning that appear mostly mundane and namely come down to some minor code alterations. This work though is in stepping towards the actual Navi/GFX10 support we expect to be dropped incredibly soon.

The eight patches alone aren't anything to get excited about just prep work. At least the eighth patch for renaming/re-documenting cache flush flags does make mention of changes with the GFX10 hardware.

It was on Monday that AMD posted 459 Linux kernel patches amounting to more than 400k lines of code (granted, mostly header files) in enabling the Navi support within their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver ahead of the upcoming Radeon RX 5700/5700XT launch. The next step in that enablement is the Mesa support.

AMD posting the Navi Mesa support is imminent and given Marek's patches today, we wouldn't be surprised if the RadeonSI Navi support were to come out tomorrow. We know that it will be here quite soon. The Mesa 19.2 feature freeze is on 6 August so there still is time regardless for getting this OpenGL driver support code reviewed and merged in time. It's certainly much more time than the AMDGPU kernel side where the Linux 5.3 merge window is kicking off in early-to-mid July and will need the Navi support squared away by then.

We're anticipating AMD to just provide Navi support for the RadeonSI OpenGL driver within Mesa and not RADV. AMD continues to invest in their own "AMDVLK" open-source Vulkan driver separate from the Mesa RADV driver maintained by the likes of Red Hat, Google, and Valve. We could always be surprised, but chances are it could be a while before seeing Navi support on RADV so early customers there may need to resort to using AMDVLK at least initially.

Anyhow, stay tuned for the imminent RadeonSI Navi support that will be covered on Phoronix as soon as it happens. And stay tuned for 7 July with our launch-day Linux benchmarks of these new graphics cards and more details on the Linux driver scene.