Valve’s subcontractor, Timur Kristóf, has presented plans to enhance Linux support for AMD GCN family video cards 1.0 “Southern Island” and 1.1 “Sea Islands”. The AMDGPU driver was recently brought to feature parity with the Radeon driver for the GCN 1.x family of video cards. This enhancement will be enabled by default in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel code base set for release in February. The GCN 1.x cards were released between 2012 and 2019 and include models like Radeon HD 77xx/78xx/79xx/87xx/88xx/89xx, Radeon R9 280, FirePro W4000-W9000, Radeon Sky 700/900, Radeon R9 265/270/370, Radeon R9 290/390, HD 7790 / 8870, and other video cards of the Radeon Rx 200 / Rx 300 families.
Additional plans have been made to further develop the support for GCN 1.x in Linux, which will also benefit other GPUs like the Polaris family. These plans include:
- Implementing support for format modifiers for GPUs of the SI, CIK, VI, and Polaris series. This will allow the use of composite managers based on Vulkan, the OpenGL driver Zink, and other components.
- Adding support for TRAVIS and NUTMEG display bridges to enable the default use of AMDGPU in configurations with CIK family APUs.
- Refactoring power management for older GPUs to unify the code with the main AMDGPU code, simplifying maintenance.
- Improving GCN 1.x support in the DC (Display Core) code to remove old code for these GPUs that do not use DC, streamlining driver maintenance.
- Addressing remaining bugs such as incorrect power consumption limitations, black screens on analog connectors, and accesses to unallocated memory pages on GPUs of the SI/CIK families.
- Introducing support for partially resident textures with patches for the Linux kernel and MESA, along with activation of this capability.
- Adding support for transfer queue in the RADV driver for older GPUs.