A fix for old ATI/AMD Radeon R600-era GPUs is headed to Linux 7.5, and the contributor used OpenAI’s Codex to get there, Phoronix reports. Ted Bullock was chasing video corruption on an iMac7,1 with an RV610. When the decoder read compressed video from system memory while the GPU was drawing, frames got corrupted. Moving the input to VRAM fixed it.
His patch keeps UVD buffers in VRAM for RV610, RV620, RV630, RV635 and RV670, which share the RV6xx decoder path. “I tested this on Debian. I used Codex to help with the investigation, testing and patch,” he wrote, and noted someone with the other chips would need to verify. The patch was accepted and is in AMD’s pull request for Linux 7.5.
My take
This is the AI-in-the-kernel story I like. A real person, real old hardware, a clear explanation, and honest about what wasn’t tested. That’s how you send a patch, AI or not.
God Bless, and May the Source Be with You!
