DragonFlyBSD’s AMDGPU kernel graphics driver continues to be a port of the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. Their latest porting effort for AMD graphics on DragonFlyBSD is now enabling optional support for the GCN 1.1 “Sea Islands (CIK) graphics processors on this modern alternative to the prior Radeon kernel driver.
Just as how until recently when GCN 1.0 and 1.1 now default to AMDGPU in Linux 6.19, DragonFlyBSD is in a similar situation although they are just enabling the GCN 1.1 optional support in AMDGPU for the first time. DragonFlyBSD’s AMDGPU driver though remains far behind the current upstream kernel state in still relying on Linux 4.20.17 kernel sources.
By default GCN 1.1 GPUs like Hawaii, Kabini, Kaveri, Bonaire, and others aren’t using AMDGPU but require setting the drm.amdgpu.cik_support=1 option in DragonFly’s /boot/loader.conf file. More details for those interested via this DragonFlyBSD commit.
Hopefully eventually DragonFlyBSD is able to catch-up closer to the latest upstream Linux AMDGPU driver state where it could then consider enabling GCN 1.1 (and GCN 1.0) support by default on this modern AMDGPU driver.
