Active Members Fi8sVrs Posted March 21, 2012 Active Members Report Posted March 21, 2012 AMD has finally released the open-source driver code to support the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" GPUs and next-generation Fusion "Trinity" APUs under Linux with their open-source driver. Alex Deucher of AMD fired off an email to the DRI development list this afternoon with a set of 48 patches attached to provide the Southern Islands and Trinity DRM support patches, which will now need to land into the mainline Linux kernel. With the set of 48 patches also comes new microcode for Southern Islands and Trinity. The Southern Islands microcode consists of Tahiti, Pitcirn, and Verde. The Trinity microcode is for the Aruba codename. With this Radeon DRM/KMS driver enablement there is initial DCE6 display watermark support, support for CRTC power-gating, support for the Southern Islands internal thermal sensor, support for SI GPU reset, a VM CS (Command Stream) checker, and the other code necessary for this new hardware enablement. The Linux 3.4 kernel merge window opened this week and will remain open through next week. Let's hope these Radeon DRM/KMS patches will be cleared immediately for part of the DRM pull and make it into the Linux 3.4 kernel. It's unfortunate that the Radeon HD 7000 series open-source support is coming months late (I've been talking about the S.I. open-source driver support since last November, with many HD 7000 series Linux updates since), but at least it's here now and that the Trinity Fusion APU support is coming at the same time. As of right now, however, I haven't seen the new Gallium3D driver for Mesa be introduced yet for the Radeon HD 7000 series nor any Trinity patches. The Radeon DRM patches were published just minutes ago, so hopefully the Gallium3D and xf86-video-ati patches are still on the agenda for this afternoon. You can see my Radeon HD 7950 Linux review from earlier this month using the proprietary Catalyst Linux driver. Additional Radeon HD 7950 Linux benchmarks are forthcoming, plus soon as the xf86-video-ati/Gallium3D patches are ready to go with these new Radeon kernel patches, there will be open-source Linux benchmarks. On the AMD Fusion "Trinity" APU side, there's already some early Linux findings.[Phoronix] AMD Publishes Open-Source HD 7000, Trinity Code Quote
