Radeon News Archives


1,925 Radeon open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.

AMD "Cleaner Shader" Coming For GFX11.0.3 GPUs To Help Ensure User/App Isolation
AMD "Cleaner Shader" Coming For GFX11.0.3 GPUs To Help Ensure User/App Isolation

A new patch posted today for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver is introducing a "cleaner shader" explicitly for GFX11.0.3 GPUs like the Radeon 780M integrated graphics to help ensure that there is sufficient data isolation between different workloads running on the GPUs. The motivation isn't clear if there is some GFX11.0.3 security vulnerability, some AMD Linux customer particularly concerned about security on said GPUs, or some other motivation for focusing this latest cleaner shader work on GFX11.0.3 hardware.

30 October 2024 - AMD Cleaner Shader - 9 Comments
DRM Panic "Screen of Death" Support Being Extended To All Recent AMD GPUs
DRM Panic "Screen of Death" Support Being Extended To All Recent AMD GPUs

DRM_Panic is the functionality first added in Linux 6.10 for "Blue Screen of Death" type functionality when a kernel panic occurs or similar for displaying a nice graphical error message. Since the initial introduction it's been extended to handle QR code error messages, monochrome logos, and other customization options. The AMDGPU driver has new patches available for expanding the DRM_Panic support to all DCE/DCN-based graphics cards.

30 October 2024 - DRM_Panic - 20 Comments
AMD ROCm Looks Like It Will Finally Be Supporting OpenCL 3.0 Soon
AMD ROCm Looks Like It Will Finally Be Supporting OpenCL 3.0 Soon

The OpenCL 3.0 compute specification has been out in finalized form since September 2020. Since then NVIDIA's official Windows/Linux drivers have been exposing OpenCL 3.0 going back to 2021, the Intel Compute Runtime stack has also been exposing OpenCL 3.0 support for years, and even with Mesa's Rusticl open-source OpenCL implementation it's beginning to see Gallium3D drivers with conformant OpenCL 3.0. Yet if installing the AMD ROCm compute stack right now, you'll see OpenCL 2.1. But it looks like OpenCL 3.0 will soon be here for ROCm.

18 October 2024 - AMD ROCm + OpenCL 3.0 - 20 Comments
Red Hat Engineer Working On DRM Panic Support For AMDGPU Driver
Red Hat Engineer Working On DRM Panic Support For AMDGPU Driver

Red Hat engineer Jocelyn Falempe has been working to sort out DRM Panic support for the AMDGPU driver. The DRM Panic infrastructure is useful since it's what allows presenting a panic screen, a.k.a. a "Blue Screen of Death" type experience when running into major kernel problems. With Linux 6.12 there's now the ability to show QR codes for error messages with DRM Panic.

4 October 2024 - DRM Panic - 28 Comments
DOOM Ported To Run Atop AMD ROCm + LLVM libc
DOOM Ported To Run Atop AMD ROCm + LLVM libc

An open-source developer at AMD has carried out a DOOM port that runs almost entirely atop AMD GPUs for rendering and the game logic. This DOOM GPU port relies on the AMD ROCm library with the LLVM libc C library for offloading the classic DOOM to the AMD GPU.

30 September 2024 - DOOM ROCm Port - 43 Comments
AMD Publishes RDNA 3.5 ISA Documentation
AMD Publishes RDNA 3.5 ISA Documentation

AMD today made public their RDNA 3.5 instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for these updated RDNA3 graphics found within new Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" APUs thus far.

16 September 2024 - RDNA 3.5 ISA Guide - 11 Comments
AMD GPU Linux Driver Becoming "Really Really Big" That It's Starting To Cause Problems
AMD GPU Linux Driver Becoming "Really Really Big" That It's Starting To Cause Problems

The modern AMD kernel graphics driver "AMDGPU" is the biggest driver within the mainline Linux kernel and is approaching six million lines of code albeit a large chunk of that is made up of auto-generated header files for each supported GPU. But this AMDGPU kernel driver is becoming "really really big" that it's beginning to cause issues for Plymouth that commonly provides the initial boot splash screen experience on modern Linux desktops.

15 September 2024 - AMDGPU Driver - 67 Comments
Linux 6.11-rc7 To Fix A "Massive Performance Regression" For AMD Graphics
Linux 6.11-rc7 To Fix A "Massive Performance Regression" For AMD Graphics

Sent out today were the DRM fixes for 6.11-rc7 ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc7 kernel being released on Sunday. As usual most of the changes revolve around the AMDGPU and Intel i915/Xe drivers plus random fixes to the smaller drivers. There is one change though with the AMD Radeon graphics driver side worth highlighting to address a performance regression affecting recent kernels.

6 September 2024 - Massive Performance Regression - 23 Comments
RADV Enables Vulkan Video By Default For RDNA3 / VCN4 GPUs
RADV Enables Vulkan Video By Default For RDNA3 / VCN4 GPUs

With Mesa's RADV driver supporting Vulkan Video for accelerated video encode/decode using this cross-platform, industry standard API it hasn't been exposed by default for RDNA3 graphics processors bearing VCN4 IP. That has now changed for Mesa 24.3 when using the latest VCN4 firmware.

27 August 2024 - RADV Vulkan Video - 22 Comments
RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Adds GL_KHR_shader_subgroup Support
RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Adds GL_KHR_shader_subgroup Support

It's not too often these days seeing new OpenGL extensions come to Mesa drivers given their already robust coverage and not many new OpenGL extensions being introduced compared to the still-expanding Vulkan APIs. Overnight though RadeonSI Gallium3D saw GL_KHR_shader_subgroup support land.

26 August 2024 - GL_KHR_shader_subgroup - 3 Comments
Big Video Encoding Rework Lands For AMD Open-Source Mesa 24.3 Driver
Big Video Encoding Rework Lands For AMD Open-Source Mesa 24.3 Driver

A set of a dozen patches have reworked the video encode handling within Mesa 24.3 for the Video Acceleration (VA) front-end and the RadeonSI/VCN driver code. This rework aims to enable new features moving forward, enhance the overall driver, and bring "significant" memory savings for H.265/HEVC video encoding.

23 August 2024 - Video Encoding Rework - 4 Comments
AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 Brings Official Ubuntu 24.04 Support & New Performance Tuning
AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 Brings Official Ubuntu 24.04 Support & New Performance Tuning

Hitting the release button minutes ago, AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 is available as the newest version of AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver and the first new release since the end of June. This driver continues to trail in popularity to the likes of the Valve-backed Mesa RADV Radeon Vulkan driver but does well in areas like Vulkan ray-tracing and is officially backed by AMD.

13 August 2024 - AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 - 4 Comments
Open-Source AMD GPU Implementation Of CUDA "ZLUDA" Has Been Taken Down
Open-Source AMD GPU Implementation Of CUDA "ZLUDA" Has Been Taken Down

Back in February of this year you may recall the interesting news that was announced on Phoronix that AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source. That open-source ZLUDA code for AMD GPUs has been available since AMD quit funding the developer earlier this year. But now the code has been retracted. It's not from NVIDIA legal challenges but rather AMD reversing course on allowing it to be open-source.

6 August 2024 - Open-Source AMD CUDA - 180 Comments
The Open-Source AMD GPU Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Nears 5.8 Million Lines
The Open-Source AMD GPU Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Nears 5.8 Million Lines

Last August I wrote an article about the open-source AMD GPU kernel driver crossing 5 million lines of code -- including their overzealous header files -- and following the recent Linux 6.11 merge window curiosity got the best of me with how much larger the kernel driver is now that the initial RDNA4 support is merged... Well, it's about to cross 5.8 million lines, or about a 16% increase just over the past year.

4 August 2024 - AMDGPU Line Count - 55 Comments
AMD Releases ROCm 6.2 With New Components, Improves PyTorch & TensorFlow
AMD Releases ROCm 6.2 With New Components, Improves PyTorch & TensorFlow

As expected, AMD has released ROCm 6.2 as the newest version of their open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon graphics cards and Instinct accelerators. ROCm 6.2 is a big update with several new software components, improving the existing PyTorch and TensorFlow support, and a variety of other enhancements as AMD works to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA.

2 August 2024 - ROCm 6.2 - 25 Comments
AMD Updates DMCUB Firmware For RDNA3.5 Graphics With Strix Point
AMD Updates DMCUB Firmware For RDNA3.5 Graphics With Strix Point

As I noted in yesterday's AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 review and in particular the new RDNA3.5-based Radeon 890M graphics, I used updated DMCUB firmware with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack to workaround some screen freezes and kernel errors initially experience while using the Linux 6.10 kernel. That updated DMCUB firmware is now public within the upstream linux-firmware.git repository for those that may be picking up a new AMD Ryzen AI laptop with RDNA3.5 graphics in the coming days.

29 July 2024 - DMCUB - Add A Comment
New "SCALE" Software Allows Natively Compiling CUDA Apps For AMD GPUs
New "SCALE" Software Allows Natively Compiling CUDA Apps For AMD GPUs

While there have been various efforts like HIPIFY to help in translating CUDA source code to portable C++ code for AMD GPUs and then the previously-AMD-funded ZLUDA to allow CUDA binaries to run on AMD GPUs via a drop-in replacement to CUDA libraries, there's a new contender in town: SCALE. SCALE is now public as a GPGPU toolchain for allowing CUDA programs to be natively run on AMD graphics processors.

15 July 2024 - SCALE CUDA For AMD GPUs - 102 Comments
AMD's Advanced Media Framework Promotes RADV Support
AMD's Advanced Media Framework Promotes RADV Support

AMD today published version 1.4.34 of its Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK. This accelerated multimedia framework is used on Linux and Windows for integrating with games/applications leveraging DirectX, OpenGL, and OpenCL with interoperability support for Radeon GPU customers.

27 June 2024 - AMD AMF + RADV - 137 Comments

1925 Radeon news articles published on Phoronix.