AMD sends second round of AMDGPU Radeon Driver for Linux Kernel 5.3 – No Navi Yet

After sending an initial series of changes to the AMDGPU DRM driver last week to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.3 merge next month, the second batch of updates was sent in today.

Today’s pull request disables support for the timeline synchronization object, that was sent last week until the extension is ready, driver reloads fixes, various updates to the DC display code, a RAS fix and an improvement on the TTM when a heavy memory conflict occurs.

Including in this display code work are bandwidth calculation updates, refactoring of the clock handling code and some minor fixes.

You will find all the latest changes in this pull request.

It looks like the big change we were expecting for the AMDGPU driver in the Linux 5.3 cycle, an initial Navi/RDNA GPU support, haven’t still been sent in, still due to AMD aiming to support Radeon RX 5700 “Navi” in Linux 5.3 and Mesa 19.2, likely we will see the code drop later this week or next week.

Considering the driver release for the past AMD GPUs, such as Polaris, Vega and Radeon VII this driver update seems to be in late, I personally hope this won’t mean that AMD is, internally, rushing to compete against NVIDIA’s GPUs, and the next possible release of an RTX 2070ti.

Considering that a new Kernel release is due, around, every 3 months if AMD aims to release at the end of Summer they are, likely, two release cycle behind(due to the time required to get the approval and refining the drivers, especially on new generation)