AMDGPU Southern Islands Support Added To Mesa's DRM Library

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 5 September 2016 at 11:07 AM EDT. 21 Comments
MESA
Following the AMDGPU SI / GCN 1.0 support hitting Mesa, the libdrm changes for AMD Southern Islands support has also landed.

Those pulling down the latest Mesa DRM (libdrm) code this morning will find that the SI support is present plus there is also an AMDGPU fix as well as synching the AMDGPU DRM header files from the kernel tree. This support will ultimately be released in libdrm 2.4.71.

While the Mesa and libdrm changes are landed in Git for allowing the original GCN 1.0 GPUs to work with the newer AMDGPU kernel DRM driver, the actual AMDGPU DRM changes have yet to land. There's hope that the code will land for Linux 4.9, but the SI support wasn't added to the first DRM-Next pull request of material being queued for Linux 4.9... There's still a few weeks to make that happen for seeing the GCN 1.0 support land (and if you want to dream, the DAL support too).

When that GCN 1.0 support does land for allowing the AMDGPU kernel driver to control those GPUs rather than the Radeon DRM driver, it will be hidden by default behind a build-time Kconfig switch just as the GCN 1.1 support is too. Having GCN 1.0 AMDGPU support will ultimately allow these original Radeon HD 7000 series (and various re-branded GPUs in other series) have Vulkan support, work with the AMDGPU-PRO driver stack if wanting to use that proprietary OpenCL/OpenGL code, plus the AMDGPU kernel driver is better engineered overall than the long-standing Radeon DRM code.
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