Vulkan API Improvements Coming For The AMD Polaris GPUs With Mesa RADV

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has done an incredible job improving older AMD GPU support under Linux with migrating GCN 1.0/1.1 era hardware to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver and an assortment of other improvements for various older Radeon GPUs. The newest work is on enhancing the RADV Vulkan driver support for old Radeon RX 400/500 "Polaris" graphics cards. Timur is working on implementing transfer queues support for Polaris GPUs for performing async data copies. What was merged yesterday were some prep changes and fixes. Notably, it makes Vulkan on Polaris GPUs more reliable. Timur noted in the merge request now in Mesa 26.3-devel: "With these fixes, I was able to complete a stress test of 20 successful full VK CTS runs with the transfer queue implementation on the Polaris machine in our CI. (Without these fixes, it had a 50% failure rate.)" Now successful in reliably running the Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) on these ten year old RX 400/500 class GPUs. The radv_sdma_legacy Git branch is where he's working on enabling the transfer queue support not only for Polaris GPUs but Hawaii GPUs too. That code isn't yet queued up for mainline Mesa and at the moment also requires the RADV_EXPERIMENTAL=transfer_queue environment variable for activation.