AMD Posts 459 Linux Kernel Patches Providing Navi Support - 412k+ Lines Of Code

As we've been expecting, AMD's open-source developers today posted their set of patches enabling Navi (10) support within their AMDGPU DRM kernel driver. Bringing up the Navi support in kernel-space are 459 patches amounting to more than four-hundred thousand lines of code, not counting the work done to LLVM as part of their shader compiler back-end or the yet-to-be-published OpenGL/Vulkan driver patches.

This big code addition is necessary given all the changes to Navi10/RDNA but, yes, a lot of the changes are automated register headers. This initial open-source Navi GPU support includes the core driver enablement, display support using their new DCN2 "Display Core Next 2", GFX10 graphics and compute, SDMA5 system DMA, VCN2 "Video Core Next 2" multimedia encode/decode, and power management.

This initial Navi support can be found in this Git branch. They are aiming to have this Navi 10 code reviewed and prepped for mainlining with the Linux 5.3 kernel, which is getting a bit tight but should be manageable if the Direct Rendering Manager maintainers don't object. The Linux 5.3 kernel cycle merge window will be opening up in July while the Linux 5.3 stable release will be out in September.

These AMDGPU DRM driver additions also include new bits around GDDR6 video memory support, firmware changes, clock-gating changes, PSP 11.0 security, and AMDKFD compute bits. Navi 10 PCI IDs added include 0x7310, 0x7312, 0x7318, 0x731A, and 0x731F.

See my Radeon RX 5700 series Linux overview from last week for more background information. Overall those targets and versioned outlined there remain accurate. Those planning to pick up new Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards next month will either need to be using Git snapshots or the packaged Radeon Software for Linux driver from AMD.com, on supported distributions. Around September is when everything should be nicely in released versions of the key components.

Stay tuned for Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" Linux testing on launch day at Phoronix.