Valve Engineer Drives Initiative to Make AMDGPU the Default Driver for All Radeon GPUs on Linux

A dedicated Valve engineer, known for maintaining support for legacy AMD graphics cards within the Linux kernel, is now championing a critical transition: establishing the modern AMDGPU driver as the default choice for all Radeon hardware, including models over a decade old.

The Linux desktop, bolstered by Valve's investments in gaming via the Steam Deck and Proton, continues to evolve rapidly, particularly in its graphics stack. At the heart of this evolution is a push for standardization and modernization, exemplified by the latest initiative to fully transition all remaining legacy AMD graphics cards to the superior AMDGPU kernel driver.

The Two Drivers: AMDGPU vs. Radeon

For years, AMD-based GPUs on Linux have relied on two primary kernel drivers: the older Radeon driver and the newer, more advanced AMDGPU driver. The original Radeon driver was designed for legacy hardware and older architectures (like the TeraScale and Southern Islands generations), while AMDGPU was built to handle modern AMD GPUs (GCN 1.0 architecture and newer).

However, the modern AMDGPU driver offers several critical advantages, including better power management, superior performance, and native support for key technologies used by the Mesa userspace drivers (RadeonSI). Standardizing on AMDGPU is essential for simplifying the kernel, reducing maintenance burden, and ensuring all AMD users benefit from the latest improvements and security updates.

The Linux Gaming Stakeholder

This push is being driven by a Valve software engineer who has a long track record of community contributions, particularly in ensuring old Radeon cards—some over ten years old—remain functional and performant on Linux. This work is crucial for the open-source community, where users often keep hardware running far longer than on proprietary operating systems.

The engineer is now proposing moving the default driver flag from Radeon to AMDGPU for GPUs based on the Southern Islands (GCN 1.0) architecture. While these cards technically work with both drivers, defaulting to AMDGPU signals to users and distributions that this is the path forward. This move effectively consolidates the AMD graphics driver development efforts under the modern framework.

Benefits of the Consolidation

Making AMDGPU the default offers several immediate and long-term benefits:

• Unified Development: It allows developers to focus their efforts on a single, modern driver codebase, leading to faster bug fixes and feature rollouts for all users.
• Enhanced Features: Older cards gain access to better power management, superior memory allocation features, and the more robust infrastructure of the AMDGPU driver.
• Future-Proofing: By migrating legacy users, the Linux ecosystem future-proofs their hardware, ensuring compatibility with upcoming kernel releases and modern graphics APIs like Vulkan.
• Simplified Support: Linux distributions and support channels can simplify their troubleshooting guides, knowing that a single kernel driver handles all modern and near-modern AMD graphics cards.

This initiative underscores Valve's commitment to improving the underlying infrastructure of Linux, ensuring that even users with older, budget-friendly hardware can enjoy a seamless and modern computing, and increasingly, gaming, experience.

The proposal is currently working its way through the Linux kernel mailing lists, and if accepted, will roll out to all users in a future kernel update, marking a major milestone in the standardization of the open-source graphics stack.