Last week we saw the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver add SQ Thread Trace support for this hardware block found on AMD GPUs. The SQTT block is used for performance profiling and now the RADV support has been extended to handle GFX10/Navi.

A new version of the Radeon Open Compute "ROCm" stack is available today but it still doesn't deliver on Navi support.

On top of the Mesa "RADV" Vulkan driver's recent support for using the Radeon GPU Profiler with this open-source driver, RADV is now adding support for the SQTT hardware block on Radeon GPUs for expanding the profiling metrics it is able to expose.

AMD Linux kernel graphics driver maintainer Alex Deucher has submitted the company's first batch of graphics driver updates to DRM-Next that in turn is for inclusion with the upcoming Linux 5.7 cycle.

Stemming from incorrect rendering with VA-API and UYVY422 content with AMD Radeon graphics on Linux, a number of fixes were merged today for improving the Gallium3D video code.

Now hitting about mid-way through the Linux 5.6 kernel with early fallout having been addressed, we've been ramping up our testing/benchmarking of this next major kernel release. Here is our initial experience with the AMDGPU driver on Linux 5.6.

AMD's Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q1.1 Linux driver release was made available this week as their newest quarterly driver installment intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics hardware.

AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 is out as the first official AMD open-source Vulkan Linux driver code drop in one month.

Valve open-source driver developer Samuel Pitoiset has contributed some improvements to Mesa 20.1's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver benefiting GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards.

It's been years since last hearing anything about sisched as the SI machine instruction scheduler that started out for the RadeonSI OpenGL driver and was ultimately supported by the RADV Vulkan driver too.

AMD this morning announced the Radeon Pro W5500 as their latest workstation graphics card designed for modern design and engineering needs.

It looks like with the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle this spring there should be proper backlight support when using this AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver with modern HDR/OLED displays.

With last month's release of the Radeon RX 5600 XT as quite a capable sub-$300 graphics card there was a new video BIOS at launch-day to significantly improve the performance even more. But that updated vBIOS was causing issues with the Linux driver. The necessary fix has now landed in linux-firmware.git as the necessary SMC firmware update for Navi.

Over the past week have been two patch series in working to enable BACO (Bus Active, Chip Off) support and in turn power management capabilities when using AMDKFD (Kernel Fusion Driver) for compute workloads.

As last minute material for Mesa 20.0 is making Valve's "ACO" AMD compiler back-end for the RADV Vulkan driver in better shape for GFX6/GCN1.0 graphics hardware.

Out this morning is AMDVLK 2020.Q1.1 as AMD's first official open-source Vulkan driver code drop of the new year.

After already several rounds of feature work queued in DRM-Next for Linux 5.6, AMD has submitted a final batch of feature work for this next kernel as it concerns their AMDGPU graphics driver.

AOMP is the AMD GPU compiler for OpenMP and HIP support on GPUs as part of Radeon Open Compute 3.0 (ROCm 3.0). Now they have begun providing PowerPC 64-bit LE builds of AOMP as part of allowing Radeon GPU compute to happen on POWER9 systems.

The NGG (Next-Gen Geometry) support with Navi continues to be refined by the open-source AMD Linux graphics drivers with the RADV Vulkan driver seeing a fresh batch of fixes/clean-ups, inspired in part by the NGG code from the RadeonSI and AMDVLK drivers.

Time is quickly running out to get new code into DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.6 merge window. AMD on Thursday did send out another feature pull request with some interesting additions worth mentioning.

While on the back-half of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle, sent in on Wednesday were an interesting batch of AMDGPU driver fixes that are quite notable.

For those plagued by OpenGL corruption issues with the RadeonSI driver on Polaris GPUs like the Radeon RX 580, System DMA (SDMA) support is now being disabled as a workaround.

AMD has issued their first update to the open-source Radeon GPU Profiler since the v1.6 update last July that introduced initial RDNA/Navi support.

Last week I reported on a possible workaround for helping AMD APUs with stability issues on recent Linux kernels. That behavior will now be the new temporary default in dealing with stability issues on Raven APUs.

It was just shy of a month ago in Mesa 20.0-devel code that RadeonSI enabled NIR by default to enjoy OpenGL 4.6 support and now already ahead of the Mesa 20.0 branching the previous TGSI code-path has been removed. TGSI has been the default intermediate representation of RadeonSI and other Gallium3D drivers but these days NIR has become the go-to IR for Mesa drivers.

When navigating the AMD.com driver downloads area the Radeon Software for Linux 19.30 driver is still referred to, which was released back on 5 November. That 19.30 driver series has been around for a while and we've been waiting for the 19.50 series driver to match their recent Windows driver update. It turns out there is a Radeon Software for Linux 19.50 driver that is public albeit not widely advertised.

Hitting Mesa 20.0-devel a short time ago were a set of patches to the Radeon Gallium3D video code for fixing 10-bit HEVC video decode support.

By default the Linux kernel selects the aging Radeon DRM driver for GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" hardware (as well as all older ATI/AMD GPUs) while it's GCN 1.2 and newer that defaults to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver. But for years there has been experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 support available via kernel module options, but now for the original GCN GPUs that code is at risk of being dropped.

In going through the AMDGPU kernel driver changes currently queuing ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle, "virtual DCN" support is coming in working on SR-IOV display support.

AMD's official Vulkan driver team has pushed a new code drop of their open-source Linux "AMDVLK" derivative for those wanting to give it a whirl for some holiday gaming.