A few weeks ago I began talking about the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series driver support, but this week there is some new information to share about the hardware enablement for the next-generation of Radeon graphics processors as well as next year’s AMD Trinity APUs.

Over the weekend in the Phoronix Forums were comments by AMD’s John Bridgman regarding the HDMI audio driver support still missing for the Radeon HD 5000 series and newer. He explained it was tied up in legal review, etc. Of course, it was just days later that the Evergreen HDMI audio support was reverse-engineered to enable HDMI stereo support within the open-source Linux Radeon DRM driver. Being a very frequent contributor to the Phoronix Forums, John Bridgman followed up to reader inquiries and answered some more questions. This is where we learn of new Trinity and GCN information.

John Bridgman commented on the AMD open-source Linux road-map (fear not, AMD PR, it was not any product/hardware or Catalyst road-maps).

In terms of roadmap it’s basically the stuff we talked about at XDC recently – next generation hardware (GCN), changes to memory management, OpenCL, more work on trying to open up UVD, along with ongoing support & bug fixing.

In terms of what is working and what isn’t, Trinity is basically working and the focus now is building up the GCN acceleration stack. Kernel driver for GCN has been working for a while although changes to memory management are continuing, and work is ramping up on shader compiler and 3D acceleration. We’re working in a slightly different sequence from what we used on previous new generations — command submission before display, and 3D before 2D — in order to align better with some other projects.

A good chunk of the shader compiler work is common between GCN and OpenCL, so you can choose which of those you want to think Tom is working on. Tom is also the first contact for android-x86 issues.

It was easier to talk about this stuff when we were catching up, and working on hardware which had already been released. This “get ahead of the game and work on unreleased hardware” stuff is a bit of a pain, in the sense that there’s much less we can talk about while the work is being done. We are trying to release portions of the work early wherever possible (eg the multi-ring support pushed out recently), hoping to get the revised memory management code out into the light next so that other devs can have a chance to review & comment before it goes upstream.

I guess it’s fair to say that a lot of the work so far has been foundation technology which is optional on current chips but which is an essential pre-requisite for the next round of hardware support. I’m not talking about UVD here because I still don’t know what the endgame is going to be, but there is a fair amount of work going on there as well.

• READ MORE (Source): [Phoronix] AMD Driver Support State For Radeon HD 7000 Series, Trinity