AMD XDNA Linux Driver For Ryzen AI, Zen 5 Compiler Support & Other AMD Q1 Highlights
Aside from all the AMD Linux hardware reviews and benchmark content, below is a look at just the most popular AMD open-source/Linux news for the quarter in looking back at their progress made for Linux users. These highlights include:
HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought By AMD
One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed.
AMD Publishes XDNA Linux Driver: Support For Ryzen AI On Linux
With the AMD Ryzen 7040 series "Ryzen AI" was introduced as leveraging Xilinx IP onboard the new Zen 4 mobile processors. Ryzen AI is beginning to work its way out to more processors while it hasn't been supported on Linux. Then in October was AMD wanting to hear from customer requests around Ryzen AI Linux support. Well, today they did their first public code drop of the XDNA Linux driver for providing open-source support for Ryzen AI.
AMD Proposes An FPGA Subsystem User-Space Interface For Linux
AMD engineers are proposing an FPGA Subsystem User-Space Interface to overcome current limitations of the Linux kernel's FPGA manager subsystem.
Lisa Su Says The "Team Is On It" After Tweet About Open-Source AMD GPU Firmware
George Hotz with Tiny Corp that is working on Tinygrad and TinyBox for interesting developments in the open-source AI space has previously called out AMD over ROCm issues. Yesterday yielded new tweets by "the tiny corp" over AI training runs crashing with MES errors and then called for AMD open-sourcing the firmware to which AMD CEO Lisa Su has responded.
Awesome Changes Coming With Linux 6.9: Lots From Intel/AMD, FUSE Passthrough & More Rust
Depending upon how Linus Torvalds is feeling today, Linux 6.8 could debut today as stable and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.9 merge window... Otherwise it will be punted off by one week. In any event, there's a lot of interesting work queuing for Linux 6.9 as shared in today's preview.
AMDGPU Linux Driver No Longer Lets You Have Unlimited Control To Lower Your Power Limit
The AMDGPU Linux driver up until the recent Linux 6.7 kernel release has let you lower the power limit of your graphics card with, well, no limits... This has allowed AMD Radeon Linux users to limit their GPU power draw when desiring for power/efficiency reasons. But since Linux 6.7 they've begun enforcing a lower-power limit set by the respective graphics card BIOS. Users petitioned to have this change reverted but in the name of safety this lower-limit enforcement will stand.
AMD Zen 5 Compiler Support Posted For GCC - Confirms New AVX Features & More
Making for a very exciting Saturday morning, AMD just posted their initial enablement patch for plumbing Zen 5 processor support "znver5" into the GNU Compiler Collection! With GCC 14 due to be released as stable in March~April as usual for the annual compiler release, it's been frustrating to see no Zen 5 support even while Intel has already been working on Clear Water Forest and Panther Lake support with already having upstreamed Sierra Forest, Granite Rapids, and other new CPU targets months ago... Well, Granite Rapids was added to GCC in late 2022. But squeezing in as what should now be merged in time is the initial AMD Zen 5 support!
Steam On Linux Falls Short Of 2% For January, AMD CPU Adoption On Linux Hits 70.5%
With the start of a new month comes the Steam Survey results for the month prior. For January 2024, the reported Steam on Linux marketshare continued falling just short of the 2% threshold.
Linux 6.9 Adding AMD MI300 Row Retirement Support For Problematic HBM Memory
For the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle there are a number of AMD Instinct MI300 additions to the EDAC (Error Detection And Correction) and RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) drivers.
Valve Lands A Last Minute AMD ACO Improvement For Mesa 24.0
This week prior to the Mesa 24.0 feature freeze / code branching, a notable merge request landed that had been worked on the past few months by one of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver developers.
Steam's February Survey: AMD CPUs & GPUs Continue To Dominate For Linux Gamers
With Steam on Linux use for January clocking in at 1.95%, I was very eager to see if the February results would once again surpass the 2.0% threshold... Unfortunately, it moved in the opposite direction.
AMD Core Performance Boost Patches Posted For P-State Linux Driver
While not quite as exciting as yesterday's AMD XDNA driver publishing for Ryzen AI on Linux, a notable patch series out of AMD today on the Linux front is enabling AMD Core Performance Boost controls within their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.
AMD FreeSync Video Facing Retirement In Linux 6.9
Back in 2020 AMD rolled out a video mode optimization for FreeSync on Linux, continued being revised in 2021, FreeSync Video mode then attempted by default in 2022 but then was reverted and then only last year FreeSync Video enabled by default. But now come Linux 6.9, the feature appears to be effectively retired.
AMD's Advanced Media Framework Adds Pro Vulkan & Experimental RADV Support
AMD's GPUOpen team today released version 1.4.33 of the Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK. The AMF SDK continues to be focused on delivering optimal access to AMD hardware for multimedia processing under both Windows and Linux.
GCC 14 Compiler Might Have AMD RDNA3 GPU Support "Working For Most Purposes"
Earlier this month the GCC 14 compiler landed initial support for AMD RDNA3 "GFX11" graphics processors as part of the GNU Compiler Collection's OpenMP device offloading support for GPU compute. That initial support was rather basic but a follow-up patch has the possibility of making the RDNA3 (GFX11) support "working for most purposes" and will hopefully still be merged in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release.
Intel's Open-Source Vulkan Driver Wired Up To Support AMD's Radeon Memory Visualizer
While AMD's GPUOpen team developed the Radeon Memory Visualizer for their own Radeon graphics processors, thanks to the software working out well and being open-source and the profiling/dump format being public, the Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver has added support for it. With the Intel ANV Mesa driver you can now generate Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) compatible dumps that can then be loaded into the GPUOpen software for analyzing the video memory behavior of Intel's integrated and discrete graphics.
Open-Source Intel & AMD Drivers Make Quick Progress On Vulkan Roadmap 2024 Extensions
Following this morning's embargo lift on the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 specification, Mesa merge requests were opened by Intel and RADV stakeholders in beginning to implement the new extensions for these Mesa Vulkan drivers and promoting existing extensions to their newly-minted state.
Ceph Cluster Hits 1 TiB/s Using AMD EPYC Genoa + NVMe Drives
While the new PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs may feel fast with pushing 11~12k MB/s sequential reads and writes, a Ceph storage cluster has just broken the 1 TiB/s threshold.
GCC Compiler Adds Support For Device Offloading With AMD RDNA3 APUs (GFX1103)
While there is AOMP for OpenMP device offloading based on the LLVM/Clang compiler, less talked about and not as feature-rich is the AMDGCN back-end within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that is also worked on for OpenMP device offloading capabilities to Radeon GPUs. Squeezing in for the upcoming GCC 14.1 stable release is GFX1103 support for AMD APUs with RDNA3 integrated graphics.
AMD Makes HIP Ray-Tracing Open-Source
AMD's HIP Ray-Tracing library "HIP RT" has been one of the few projects under the GPUOpen umbrella that starts off as closed-source software but then is eventually open-sourced... That happened now with the HIP ray-tracing code becoming publicly available.
What do you hope to see out of AMD on the Linux/open-source side in Q2? Let us know in the forums.
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