AMDXDNA Driver For Ryzen AI Now Ready To Appear In The Linux Kernel

The AMDXDNA kernel driver for Linux systems that was made open-source in January for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU on laptop SoCs going back to the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series is now one step away from appearing in the mainline Linux kernel in the near future.

While the AMDXDNA kernel driver was made public and open-source back in January, it wasn't until July that the AMDXDNA driver began its review process to work its way into the upstream Linux kernel. The AMDXDNA driver has gone through eleven rounds of review and revisions over the past few months but is now ready to appear in the mainline kernel.

Following the AMDXDNA v11 patches being posted, on Friday the AMDXDNA driver patches were merged into the drm-misc-next branch. With that when the drm-misc-next is then pulled into DRM-Next, it's then going to the mainline Linux kernel.

The timing is a bit of a tough spot. This more than likely means we'll see the AMDXDNA driver debut for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. We are half-way through the two week Linux 6.13 merge window. Typically new drivers can be added late since it doesn't risk regressing existing hardware support. But as drm-misc-next already has a variety of other non-AMDXDNA patches queuing, it doesn't look like they'll try a secondary pull of changes to DRM-Next in the coming days and to then squeeze into the current Linux 6.13 cycle. So short of any last minute wrangling over the coming days, the AMDXDNA driver is destined to appear in the Linux 6.14 kernel rather than the current Linux 6.13 cycle.

In any event it's now an achievement that the AMDXDNA driver has been picked up into drm-misc-next as it's now taken care of all the necessary changes to be an upstreamed accelerator driver.

It's been a long journey for the AMDXDNA driver especially with the Ryzen AI NPUs appearing in notebooks now for nearly two years, but nevertheless it's open-source and finally ready for the mainline kernel. Assuming AMDXDNA goes into Linux 6.14 rather than squeezing it into Linux 6.13, the v6.14 kernel stable release will be out around April~May.

Over in user-space, the AMD Xilinx XRT and AMD AIE Plugin for IREE allow for interacting with the Ryzen AI NPU by way of this kernel driver. There is also supposed to be coming the AMD Unified AI Software Stack that prior indications would be around the end of 2024... There's just a few weeks left to the calendar year so we will see if it makes it or not before the end of Q4. Whether that AMD Unified AI Software Stack brings a new user-space solution or just layers atop say the IREE plug-in remains to be seen.