AMD Radeon RX 6000 support

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Mon, 18 Apr 2022 00:50:50 +0000 (UTC)
"a.reviewer1234 at yahoo.com" <a.reviewer1234 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello,
Hi,

> There are no h-node entry for these cards, the deblob log shows
> dozens of entries for AMDGPU, and the Linux Firmware repo has tons of
> firmware for AMDGPU in it with no equivalents in the Linux-libre
> Firmware repo, which is worrying.
Someone needs to add support for them in linux-libre. 

We already have support for several radeon GPU families in linux-libre
so something similar needs to be done for amdgpu.

The work mainly consists in:
(1) modifying Linux or linux-libre (the patches to do are relatively
    simple for radeon, for the amdgpu driver, the patches need to be
    ported and that's also relatively easy).
(2) Compiling it and running it
(3) testing it to see if it works
(4) sending the patch to linux-libre

And optionally if you run Trisquel:
(5) testing it in Trisquel too
(6) asking Trisquel not to disable that specific patch in their kernels.

More details is available here:
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Hardware/research/gpu/radeon

It also has links to tutorial on how to do that for several FSDG
compliant distributions and so on.

As mentioned before, Trisquel has removed the patches that made the
radeon GPUs work so you'll need to use jxself linux-libre repository
(which has stock linux-libre kernels) if you want them.

Trisquel also needs people to test the patches again to restore them.
Personally I've been trying to find the time since months but I didn't
manage to find it yet.

It's also possible to get free firmwares through some work as someone
did that for the ATI/AMD GPU of a gaming console if I recall well, but
that would be order of magnitude more work.

So it's easier to fix linux-libre now as this way we'd at least have
something working, and then try to look into free firmwares if possible.

> On another note, can we start a campaign to ask AMD to liberate their
> Linux blobs?
It would be order of magnitude easier to organize a (crowdfunding)
campaign to fund someone to support for all the ATI/AMD GPUs in
linux-libre and FSDG distributions.

To do that you need to spend a lot of time on communication (writing
text, videos, responding to emails, etc) to get people to donate and to
try to find someone to fund to do the work and so on.

Though at the end of the day the work to do is pretty simple.

One of the issue is being able to handle the logistics of shipping
AMD/ATI GPUs, but that is less an issue for recent GPUs. 

Another option here would be to make patches for all the GPU families
and enable people to test them easily by making easy to install packages
for the FSDG distributions that people use. This way if there is enough
interest in this work we could even avoid all the logistics of shipping
GPUs as it would be the people that already have the GPU that would
test the work.

Personally I don't have the time to get involved because if I try to
work on too much projects at the same time none of them advance, and
right now I'm very busy with Replicant 11 and that work is urgent
(3G phasing out, NLnet funding for it running out, etc).

Denis.
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