AMD NPU Firmware Upstreamed For The Ryzen AI AMDXDNA Driver Coming In Linux 6.14

With the AMDXDNA kernel driver for Ryzen AI NPU support on Linux now ready for merging and is queued in drm-misc-next for the Linux 6.14 kernel early next year, the AMD NPU firmware binaries have also now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for having the necessary firmware support in place.

Merged today to linux-firmware.git were the three AMD NPU binaries for supporting the various Ryzen AI NPUs that have begun to be found in Ryzen laptops over the past two years.

These firmware binaries are needed by the open-source AMDXDNA kernel driver for actually being able to engage the neural processing unit. With this commit the initial firmware is now upstream in linux-firmware.git so those binaries can be easily picked up by the different Linux distributions ahead of updating to the Linux 6.14 kernel in the new year.

The Linux 6.14 merge window will open around late January or early February while the stable Linux 6.14 kernel should be out by early April. This should be the kernel version in use by Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, etc, so come next spring there should finally be nice out-of-the-box support for Ryzen AI NPUs on Linux.

Besides the AMDXDNA kernel driver and needed firmware binaries, the AMD Xilinx XRT and AMD AIE Plugin for IREE software are the user-space components currently available for leveraging the AMD NPU.