AMD Begins Work Upstreaming More Versal 2 SoC Support For Linux

Back in April AMD announced the Versal Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. In preparing for Versal2 evaluation kits expected around the middle of the year and production silicon by the end of 2025, AMD software engineers have begun ramping up their open-source and upstream-focused Linux driver support.

The Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 and Versal Prime Series Gen 2 SoCs were announced back in April for these chips with Arm Cortex-A78AE cores focused on providing end-to-end acceleration for embedded systems. Ahead of their availability expected in 2025, the Linux upstreaming effort has become more apparent in recent weeks.

Up until recently there hasn't been much in the way of AMD "Versal2" patches for the Linux kernel... Back in July was the start and just consisted of some patches for the AMD Versal Gen 2 DMA IP. Since last month though it's been picking up with new patches like enabling Versal Gen 2 10GbE network device support. Versal Gen2 is relying on Cadence Macb for 10G / 5G / 2.5G / 1G networking support -- a big improvement over the 1G support in the original AMD-Xilinx Versal. Plus there has been SPI driver patches for device reset support and other bits.

The very latest today is AMD engineers posting a set of patches for the AMD MDB "pcie-amd-mdb" Linux kernel driver. MDB in this context is the Multimedia DMA Bridge and is a new IP core with Versal Gen2. The Multimedia DMA Bridge module on Versal Gen2 works for providing PCIe Gen5 controller support on this SoC and is relying on Synopsys DesignWare IP. Those AMD MDB driver patches for Linux were posted today to the kernel mailing list and are beginning to undergo review.

It's good seeing this AMD Versal Gen2 SoC support coming about and hopefully all the features / IP blocks will be wired up to upstream and open-source Linux kernel driver support by the time the production silicon is out in late 2025.