News: 0001601130

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

RADV Adds Support For New Performance Counters To Help Game Developers

([Radeon] 2 Hours Ago Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6)


Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics team has landed improvements for the Mesa 260 RADV driver to support new performance counters in conjunction with AMD's Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6 release.

The mainline RADV driver code now supports new performance counters with Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6, including the LDS (number of LDS bank conflicts) counters, memory bytes counter, and memory counters as a percent of vRAM. There are also two ray-tracing counters now implemented too that previously weren't working.

The code merged today to Mesa 26.0-devel enables these new performance counters for GFX10 / GFX11 as RDNA1 through RDNA3.5 GPUs. The GFX12 / RDNA4 support is still being finished up but Samuel Pitoiset notes a merge request for enabling these performance counters on those newest AMD GPUs should happen soon.

This now merged code is useful for game developers and others wanting to run performance profiling on their GPU workloads to help with optimizations. More details on the new support via [1]the merge request .



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/39013


Open Source Irrational Constant

BREEZEWOOD, PA -- In a revelation that could rock the foundations of
science, a researcher in Pennsylvania has discovered that the digits of the
irrational constant PI encode a version of the Linux kernel. "I can't
believe it," the researcher, Neil Hoffman, exclaimed. "And yet, here I am
staring at what appears to be the source code for Linux kernel 5.0.0.
Needless to say, my whole world-view has changed..."

Hoffman explained, "My algorithm, which applies several dozen conversions and
manipulations to each digit of PI, spits out plain vanilla ASCII characters
that happen to form the source code for the Linux kernel."

Many members of the scientific community are skeptical. One One
mathematician who has memorized the digits of PI to 10,000 places said,
"This is the kind of nonsense one would expect to find in a tabloid such as
the National Mathematics Enquirer. Or a Linux fortune(6) file. Hoffman's
'discovery' is obviously a hoax designed to secure government research
grants."

In a related matter, we have received an unconfirmed report that a region of
the Mandelbrot fractal contains what appear to be the words "LINUS TORVALDS
WAS HERE". In addition, the words "TRANSMETA: THIS SECRET MESSAGE IS NOT
HERE YET" supposedly appear within the depths of the Julia Set.