Speaker
Description
At XDC 2025 I promised that old AMD GPUs would work great on Linux, starting from GCN 1 up to GCN 4. In this talk, I'd like to present the progress on that work and what I learned from it.
In the current economic situation of our world, people may have to use GPUs for longer, and replace them less often. And when an old GPU is replaced, it doesn’t disappear, it goes to somebody who upgrades an even older GPU. Eventually it will reach somebody that can’t afford a better one. My goal with this work is to make Linux gaming a good experience also for those who use old AMD GPUs, and learn Linux kernel development in the process.
What did this work entail?
I'll talk about implementing various display features, VCE support, DRM format modifiers, Vulkan, improved GPU hang recovery, sparse bindings, fixing memory management issues, power management bugs and making some GPUs boot that previously never worked on Linux.
With that, GCN GPUs can now run a modern Linux graphics stack using the amdgpu kernel driver and the RADV Vulkan driver.
| Code of Conduct | Yes |
|---|---|
| In-person or virtual presentation | In-person |
| GSoC, EVoC or Outreachy | No |
