News: 0001607273

  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)

DragonFlyBSD Now Allows Optional AMD GCN 1.1 Support In AMDGPU Driver

([BSD] 6 Hours Ago AMD GCN 1.1)


DragonFlyBSD's AMDGPU kernel graphics driver continues to be a port of the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. Their latest porting effort for AMD graphics on DragonFlyBSD is now enabling optional support for the GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands (CIK) graphics processors on this modern alternative to the prior Radeon kernel driver.

Just as how until recently when [1]GCN 1.0 and 1.1 now default to AMDGPU in Linux 6.19, DragonFlyBSD is in a similar situation although they are just enabling the GCN 1.1 optional support in AMDGPU for the first time. DragonFlyBSD's AMDGPU driver though remains far behind the current upstream kernel state in still relying on Linux 4.20.17 kernel sources.

By default GCN 1.1 GPUs like Hawaii, Kabini, Kaveri, Bonaire, and others aren't using AMDGPU but require setting the drm.amdgpu.cik_support=1 option in DragonFly's /boot/loader.conf file. More details for those interested via [2]this DragonFlyBSD commit .

Hopefully eventually DragonFlyBSD is able to catch-up closer to the latest upstream Linux AMDGPU driver state where it could then consider enabling GCN 1.1 (and GCN 1.0) support by default on this modern AMDGPU driver.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-619-amdgpu-radeon

[2] https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DragonFlyBSD/commit/66569439771d43fa3df306f0b11b0ef25da0f541


Like you, I am frequently haunted by profound questions related to man's
place in the Scheme of Things. Here are just a few:

Q -- Is there life after death?
A -- Definitely. I speak from personal experience here. On New
Year's Eve, 1970, I drank a full pitcher of a drink called "Black Russian",
then crawled out on the lawn and died within a matter of minutes, which was
fine with me because I had come to realize that if I had lived I would have
spent the rest of my life in the grip of the most excruciatingly painful
headache. Thanks to the miracle of modern orange juice, I was brought back
to life several days later, but in the interim I was definitely dead. I
guess my main impression of the afterlife is that it isn't so bad as long
as you keep the television turned down and don't try to eat any solid foods.
-- Dave Barry