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Graphics: Newly Submitted Linux Patches and Long Update From Dave Airlie
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WCCF Tech ☛ Newly Submitted Linux Patches To Make AMDGPU The Default Driver For GCN 1.1 GPUs Such As Radeon R9 290/390, HD 7790 And Others
Unlike Windows, thankfully, Linux operating systems won't lag in supporting older AMD GPUs, as the recent proposed Linux patches bring a bigger change. As spotted by Phoronix, Timur Kristóf, who is a part of Valve's Linux graphics driver team, has proposed new patches to the kernel driver, which will transition the GCN (Graphics Core Next) 1.1 GPUs from Radeon to the AMDGPU driver module.
This is big because the AMDGPU will now become the default driver for older AMD GPUs such as Radeon R9 290, R9 390, HD 7790, and HD 8870 GPUs. Historically, AMDGPU has been the default driver for newer GPUs like GCN 1.2 and above, but the older GPUs, such as GCN 1.0 and 1.1, remained on the Radeon driver by default. As per the new patches, the "-1" option has been added, which lets the kernel driver decide which driver to default to.
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Dave Airlie ☛ Dave Airlie: a tale of vulkan/nouveau/nvk/zink/mutter + deadlocks
I had a bug appear in my email recently which led me down a rabbit hole, and I'm going to share it for future people wondering why we can't have nice things.
Bug:
1. Get an intel/nvidia (newer than Turing) laptop.
2. Log in to GNOME on Fedora 42/43
3. Hotplug a HDMI port that is connected to the NVIDIA GPU.
4. Desktop stops working.
My initial reproduction got me a hung mutter process with a nice backtrace which pointed at the Vulkan Mesa device selection layer, trying to talk to the wayland compositor to ask it what the default device is. The problem was the process was the wayland compositor, and how was this ever supposed to work. The Vulkan device selection was called because zink called EnumeratePhysicalDevices, and zink was being loaded because we recently switched to it as the OpenGL driver for newer NVIDIA GPUs.