Last year Valve contractor Timur Kristóf managed to improve the AMDGPU driver enough for old GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs that with Linux 6.19 AMDGPU is now the default for those GPUs with better performance, RADV Vulkan out-of-the-box, and other benefits. He isn’t done though improving the old GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPU support on this modern AMDGPU kernel driver - a new patch series posted today brings some power management fixes.
Timur Kristóf posted a new patch series today focused on AMDGPU driver power management fixes for the GCN 1.0 graphics processors. This patch series is that very latest work for benefiting these 14 year old graphics processors.
At this point Gabe Newell (Valve CEO) should tell Lisa Su (AMD CEO) to move aside and step down cause he and his team at Valve are doing more work for AMD’s software/drivers than AMD themselves as far as I can tell anyways.
For ancient stuff, maybe, but AMD is also active in enabling new stuff in the kernel and userspace. AMD basically invented Vulkan, and have had the best open source driver stack for years at this point.
I love what Valve has done for Linux, but it’s the last mile of track at the end of huge amounts of outside work enabling the hardware to work in the first place.
Valve do work pretty closely on contemporary hardware, but to your point, the kernel driver is decently robust, the display abstraction layer is largely common with the windows side (and also resides in the KMD on both environments), the mesa GL driver is solid and Marek’s team are also beginning to contribute towards RADV.
AMD are also heavily involved with improving Linux desktop experience (particularly with Wayland), and host regular hackathons to that effort.
Valve and their team generating so much good will these days.
This is a great example of open source adding value for everyone. Users of those GPUs get improved performance, Valve gets to sell them more recent games, and AMD gets a nice, free reputation boost because their older hardware still receives meaningful updates.
So if anyone ever needs to convince management that open-sourcing something could be good for business, point to this!
