I'm pleased to announce the initial release of the new amdgpu driver. This is a partial replacement for the radeon driver for newer AMD asics. A number of components are still shared. Here is a comparison of the radeon and amdgpu stacks:
1. radeon stack kernel driver: radeon.ko libdrm: libdrm_radeon mesa: radeon, r200, r300, r600, radeonsi ddx: xf86-video-ati
2. amdgpu stack kernel driver: amdgpu.ko libdrm: libdrm_amdgpu mesa: radeonsi ddx: xf86-video-amdgpu
Older asics will continue to be supported by the radeon stack; new asics will be supported by the amdgpu stack. CI (Sea Islands) asics have support in both driver stacks, but this is purely for testing purposes. CI parts are officially supported in the radeon stack. Support for CI on the amdgpu stack is determined by a config option in the kernel. CI support is not enabled by default for amdgpu.
Most of our focus has been on Carrizo support, so there are some gaps in the dGPU support for Tonga and Iceland, notably power management. Those gaps will be filled in eventually.
Also included in this code base are full register headers for just about every block on the asics.
Barring the gaps mentioned above, the driver stack is functionally on par with radeon including: - OpenGL 3.3 support using the radeonsi mesa driver - Video decode support using UVD - Video encode support using VCE
The code can be found in the amdgpu branches of the following git trees. xf86-video-amdgpu: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/xf86-video-amdgpu/log/?h=amdgpu libdrm: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/drm/log/?h=amdgpu kernel: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/log/?h=amdgpu mesa: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~mareko/mesa/log/?h=amdgpu
To test the new driver stack you will need to specify a device section in your xorg.conf with the driver set to amdgpu rather than radeon.
Please review!
Thanks,
The AMD Linux Driver Team