In addition to AMD's Friday afternoon big code drop of all the UALink enablement patches for the Linux kernel and the AMDGPU driver, there was another big drop from AMD to end out the week... Upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository is all the firmware binaries needed by the open-source driver stack for initializing their forthcoming RDNA 4m "GFX 11.7" graphics.

For months we have seen Linux driver activity around enabling the GFX 11.7 "GFX117" graphics IP and other new IP blocks. These post-RDNA-3.5 (GFX 11.5) IP but shy of RDNA 4 (GFX 12.0) has been referred to in the AMDGPU LLVM documentation as RDNA 4m... The "M" potentially being for mobile. This GFX11.7 / RDNA 4m work has propagated through the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver, the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end, and also the RadeonSI and RADV drivers with various additions over GFX11.5 with some ISA additions and multiple GPU models expected.

While all of the open-source Linux driver enablement code is now upstream in the respective software projects, one of the final pieces of the puzzle to be positioned before the Linux driver support is functional is having the firmware binaries in the linux-firmware.git repository so they can be packaged up by the different Linux distribution vendors, etc. Traditionally AMD only dropped those firmware binaries at-launch or post-launch. Though in more recent times they have been doing a better job at getting those binary assets out ahead of time to provide an opportunity for Linux distributions to package them up as an update for users to provide for a better out-of-the-box experience at launch.

On Friday that firmware upstreaming milestone took place for GFX 11.7.0 and related IP. For the first time there are now the firmware binaries in linux-firmware.git for GFX 11.7.0 as well as GFX 11.7.1 (no GFX 11.7.2 yet) plus the PSP 15.0.0 and PSP 15.0.9 security firmware, SDMA 6.1.4, and also the VPE 2.0.0 engine firmware. DCN 4.2 is coming in tow too. With all the firmware images being uploaded at the same time, it's reasonable to assume RDNA 4m hardware is featuring the new VPE 2.0 video processing engine and DCN 4.2 Display Core Next display capabilities. PSP 15.0 is a leap as well for those interested in the AMD Platform Security Processor support.

This commit is what landed all those new firmware binaries into this centralized Linux firmware home. With that it appears the Linux driver stack is ready for the upcoming RDNA 4m graphics. With those IP block versions, besides these firmware files the Linux 7.3 kernel and Mesa 26.2~26.3 looks to be the good baseline for RDNA 4m graphics support. We'll see when the time comes when the hardware is actually launched and we are able to test it under Linux.