Beginning yesterday and continuing today are several patch series beginning to lay the foundation in the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver for enabling some next-generation graphics IP. Due to the AMD graphics driver block by block enablement strategy and IP-based discovery adopted by their driver over the past few years, it’s not clear what this new hardware enablement is for whether it’s RDNA5 / UDNA or some RDNA4 refresh. In any event, the Linux driver enablement has begun.
Yesterday saw the PSP 15.0.8 IP posted. Not much is revealed by this updated Platform Security Processor (PSP) block and an incremental revision over what’s already supported by the AMDGPU driver. The Platform Security Processor block on AMD GPU hardware handles firmware validation and other low-level security-related tasks.
There was also patches posted for the IH 7.1 IP block and taking the same code paths as IH 7.0. This is for the Interrupt Handler “IH” as the interrupt controller on AMD GPUs.
The new AMD GPU hardware enablement work continued today with MMHUB 4.2. MMHUB in this context is the Multimedia Hub IP.
Following that the patches were posted today for wiring up GFXHUB 12.1 for graphics. And continuing with GMC 12.1 for the graphics memory controller.
The version “12.1” graphics IP is interesting with “12.0” being for the RDNA4 graphics cards released to date. Current AMD Instinct CDNA-based accelerators are also in the version “9.x” range. So it could lead credibility to a possible RDNA4 refresh or perhaps for RDNA4 APU type parts. Or there was also the case in the past such as RDNA 1 being GFX 10.0.x while RDNA 2 was GFX 10.3.x and only then jumping to GFX 11 with RDNA 3.
As a reminder we have also been seeing AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end patches as well pointing to GFX1250 with it not being clear yet what products will bear the GFX1250 / 12.5 IP.
No immediate surprises in digging through the patches thus far… As is the typical case, for the most part there are a lot of new auto-generated header files representing the bulk of the new code.
These new open-source patches do come just days after the AMD Financial Analyst Day where they did talk of their next-gen GPU offering better AI and ray-tracing capabilities.
For now due to the IP version enablement strategy used by AMD rather than their fishy codenames of the past, it’s not immediately clear what product(s) this new driver enablement work correlates to, but at least they continue work on punctually getting their new Linux driver code open-sourced and working toward upstream. Given the timing of these patches they will presumably miss out on the upcoming Linux v6.19 merge window which could mean this next-gen GPU support being prepped for what will likely be called Linux v7.0.
