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.
Valve do work pretty closely on contemporary hardware, but to your point, the kernel driver is decently robust, the display abstraction layer is largely common with the windows side (and also resides in the KMD on both environments), the mesa GL driver is solid and Marek’s team are also beginning to contribute towards RADV.
AMD are also heavily involved with improving Linux desktop experience (particularly with Wayland), and host regular hackathons to that effort.
I don’t mean to downplay the Linux perf attainment efforts on RADV outside of AMD though, Valve, Collabora and so on really have worked wonders.