A video-playback fix for some Radeon HD 2000/3000-era GPUs has been accepted into AMD graphics updates proposed for Linux 7.5, according to Phoronix and VideoCardz. With the hardware dating to 2007, apparently the maintenance window is still open. SourceSource
Developer Ted Bullock investigated corrupted video on an older Apple iMac7,1 equipped with an RV610 Radeon GPU, using OpenAI’s Codex to help. The fix worked on his machine running Debian, but four other targeted GPU families still need verification. SourceSource
Moving video data to VRAM
In his patch explanation reproduced by Phoronix, Bullock said frames became corrupted when the video decoder read compressed video from system memory while the GPU was also drawing graphics. Moving the input into VRAM—the GPU’s dedicated video memory—allowed frames to decode correctly. Disabling graphics draws also stopped the corruption. Source
The proposed change keeps buffers for the Unified Video Decoder (UVD), the hardware video-decoding engine, in VRAM. The Radeon driver already applies similar memory-placement rules to some other chips; this patch extends that handling to RV610, RV620, RV630, RV635 and RV670. SourceSource
Bullock wrote in the same explanation:
“I used Codex to help with the investigation, testing and patch.” Source
VideoCardz reports that AMD Linux graphics maintainer Alex Deucher accepted the patch on November 2, and that it entered the AMD graphics pull request submitted on November 12 for Linux 7.5. Phoronix likewise places it in the updates headed toward that kernel’s merge window. SourceSource
One tested iMac
Bullock included the other four chip families because they share the RV6xx decoder path and legacy R600 firmware. He reasoned that they likely have the same hardware requirements, but explicitly asked for verification from people with that hardware. Source
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