On 25/09/17 04:51 AM, Kamil Paral wrote:
On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 10:53 AM, Luya Tshimbalanga <luya@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
Disclaimer: I am not a coder, just a graphic designer looking to improve the entire AMD GCN cards from an AMD power laptop.
After seeing the improvement done on AMD support from the past years, one step is missing, enable amdgpu module as default for all GCN cards including South Island and Sea Island.
A Fedora contributor  provided a special kernel with these support. It will be nice if that was applied on the mainline Fedora kernel to enhance AMD hardware for their user.

Taking initiative, I set a draft wiki on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Luya/Changes/amdgpu_default_for_GCN_cards

Idea was inspired by  this comment: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/978664-nouveau-developers-remain-blocked-by-nvidia-from-advancing-open-source-driver?p=978746#post978746

P.S: OpenCL was in considering with the ROCm project but that is another story.

Luya

Hi, I belive there are known issues when using amdgpu kernel driver with older GCN cards. Both performance wise and feature wise. You should best talk to Fedora kernel graphics team about this - I believe Dave Airlie and Adam Jackson are the right contact people here.

Thanks Kamil. Is fedora-kernel mailing list the right channel of contact?

Also, is this something that should be configured on distro level? I'd assume that AMD kernel developers could switch the older cards to amdgpu by default any time they wanted, once they consider the support good enough. That's why it is currently hidden behind an experiemental kernel cmdline switch. I'm not clear whether distribution level override is in order there.

So far, Sea Island cards are enabled by default from kernel 4.13.x while only the old GCN cards (South Island) are the last to remain experimental. Fortunately, the latter is improving quicker. Distribution override has been done before in the past to gather data for fixing issues (kdbus came in mind). After all, Fedora is about pushing new and improved technologies hence test days.

-- 
Luya Tshimbalanga
Graphic & Web Designer
E: luya@fedoraproject.org
W: http://www.coolest-storm.net