Concerns about out-of-date GPU firmware

[leyvi]

Hello. Over half a year ago, I made a lost of firmware blobs to include in my monolithic kernel.
I use a Navi 33 GPU (Radeon RX 7600). Since then, I would hope that new firmware blobs were
released for my GPU, but I haven't seen anything on fwupd or elsewhere. I also couldn't find any documentation.
It's probably possible to have a loadable module for AMDGPU and just let it do its own thing,
but I'd prefer to keep my kernel monolithic. I'm wondering if the community has any solutions?

Also, I've heard that AMD has been trying to open-source some of their firmware. If possible,
I'd love to experiment with those, depending on availability.

[leyvi]

Hope I made it clear: I just want to update my GPU firmware.

[NeddySeagoon]

leyvi,

When you build your kernel, the included firmware is pulled in from /lib/firmware. It's important to update linux-firmware before you update the kernel, so you have the latest firmware.
The firmware files do not have version strings in their names, so including them in the kernel always works, until AMD add a new firmware file. That's happened to me once or twice.
Then booting fails due to missing firmware. :)

If you want to see when firmware files have been updated, look at the git log for linux-firmware.

Its a non problem but I understand your concern. If you have the newest linux-firmware, you have the newest firmware files for your GPU as long as the kernel build is the last part of your update.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[pietinger]

[leyvi]

[leyvi]

Hey, not exactly critical, but I've noticed that when playing games that should support raytracing, it isn't an option in any of the settings.
I'm wondering if I'm missing some firmware, driver, API...
Not so relevant, given the performance of my card, but I do plan to upgrade to a Radeon 7800 XT at some point.