AMD Navi3x dGPU experience improvement

AMD Navi3x dGPU experience improvement

[Gong, Richard]

Hi,

Since AMD introduced Navi3x dGPUs, setting them up is more difficult 
than it need to be, as you need the GPU firmware binaries present in the 
filesystem before the kernel drivers can be loaded. If you don't, you'll 
just "hang" at a black screen. This is awkward because you must do 
modprobe.blacklist=amdgpu and then load the file.

A large commit series went into 6.3 that improve this experience, but 
not all of it is stable materiel.

As the dGPUs are supported on 6.1.y and 6.2.y, we can improve the 
experience specifically for these new produces by back-porting a small 
subset of commits that correspond to firmware files that are uniquely 
loaded by the new products. With these commits amdgpu driver will return 
an error code and you can continue to use framebuffer provided by UEFI 
GOP driver until you have GPU firmware binaries loaded onto your system.

Commits needed for 6.2.y
	cc42e76e7de5 "drm/amd: Load MES microcode during early_init"
	2210af50ae7f "drm/amd: Add a new helper for loading/validating microcode"
	11e0b0067ec0 "drm/amd: Use `amdgpu_ucode_*` helpers for MES"

Commits needed for 6.1.y
	6040517e4a29 "drm/amdgpu: remove deprecated MES version vars"
	cc42e76e7de5 "drm/amd: Load MES microcode during early_init"
	2210af50ae7f "drm/amd: Add a new helper for loading/validating microcode"
	11e0b0067ec0 "drm/amd: Use `amdgpu_ucode_*` helpers for MES"

Regards,
Richard

Re: AMD Navi3x dGPU experience improvement

[Greg KH]

On Mon, May 08, 2023 at 08:19:41AM -0500, Gong, Richard wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Since AMD introduced Navi3x dGPUs, setting them up is more difficult than it
> need to be, as you need the GPU firmware binaries present in the filesystem
> before the kernel drivers can be loaded. If you don't, you'll just "hang" at
> a black screen. This is awkward because you must do
> modprobe.blacklist=amdgpu and then load the file.
> 
> A large commit series went into 6.3 that improve this experience, but not
> all of it is stable materiel.
> 
> As the dGPUs are supported on 6.1.y and 6.2.y, we can improve the experience
> specifically for these new produces by back-porting a small subset of
> commits that correspond to firmware files that are uniquely loaded by the
> new products. With these commits amdgpu driver will return an error code and
> you can continue to use framebuffer provided by UEFI GOP driver until you
> have GPU firmware binaries loaded onto your system.
> 
> Commits needed for 6.2.y
> 	cc42e76e7de5 "drm/amd: Load MES microcode during early_init"
> 	2210af50ae7f "drm/amd: Add a new helper for loading/validating microcode"
> 	11e0b0067ec0 "drm/amd: Use `amdgpu_ucode_*` helpers for MES"
> 
> Commits needed for 6.1.y
> 	6040517e4a29 "drm/amdgpu: remove deprecated MES version vars"
> 	cc42e76e7de5 "drm/amd: Load MES microcode during early_init"
> 	2210af50ae7f "drm/amd: Add a new helper for loading/validating microcode"
> 	11e0b0067ec0 "drm/amd: Use `amdgpu_ucode_*` helpers for MES"

All now queued up, thanks.

greg k-h