AMD engineers posted a set of patches today for enabling VCN IP DUMP support with their open-source AMDGPU kernel driver. This allows for dumping the IP state of all Video Core Next (VCN) hardware from VCN 1.0 through VCN 5.0.

While not too terribly exciting for end-users, this IP dump support for the VCN block will hopefully assist in dealing with any VCN hardware/driver bugs for the Linux stack. The patches allow for logging of the VCN registers in the devcoredump buffers -- both for active and inactive VCN instances.

Previously there hasn't been this ability to dump the register state for the Video Core Next hardware while now it's coming in one go for VCN 1.0 through VCN 5.0. Dealing with the VCN and video IP in general with the open-source AMD Linux grapics driver has at times proved tricky for the company due to worrying about proprietary codecs / not compromising content protection standards (e.g. HDCP) / similar IP and licensing headaches in the multimedia world... It started out as quite a sticky mess years ago but with time there's been more robust video encode/decode support and other AMD video IP features wired up in open-source (though on the display side, [1]HDMI 2.1 is still an obstacle ). Presumably this VCN IP DUMP support was held back until now for similar reasons.

So hopefully with these patches for [2]VCN IP DUMP support will help AMD Linux driver developers in debugging VCN hardware/driver issues moving forward as part of devcoredump outputs. The patches are now out for review and with current timing could be potentially pulled into the v6.12 kernel.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected

[2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2024-August/112157.html