Last year Valve contractor Timur Kristóf managed to improve the AMDGPU driver enough for old GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs that with Linux 6.19 AMDGPU is now the default for those GPUs with better performance, RADV Vulkan out-of-the-box, and other benefits. He isn’t done though improving the old GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPU support on this modern AMDGPU kernel driver - a new patch series posted today brings some power management fixes.
Timur Kristóf posted a new patch series today focused on AMDGPU driver power management fixes for the GCN 1.0 graphics processors. This patch series is that very latest work for benefiting these 14 year old graphics processors.
For ancient stuff, maybe, but AMD is also active in enabling new stuff in the kernel and userspace. AMD basically invented Vulkan, and have had the best open source driver stack for years at this point.
I love what Valve has done for Linux, but it’s the last mile of track at the end of huge amounts of outside work enabling the hardware to work in the first place.