Radeon Software 18.40 Released For Linux Systems

Primarily for Linux workstation customers, AMD today released Radeon Software 18.40 as the collection of their closed-source Vulkan/OpenGL components as well as PAL OpenCL driver plus the option of using their packaged "All-Open" driver stack that is a snapshot of their Mesa-based driver components.

The vast majority of Phoronix readers are best off using their distribution-supplied Mesa-based Radeon graphics drivers or the third-party PPAs / package archives for riding the bleeding-edge Mesa, if you aren't building the code yourself already. But for those needing the (now slower) proprietary OpenGL driver for specific workstation needs or just wanting to use the officially AMD blessed graphics driver, that's the (small) void Radeon Software on Linux fills today.

With the Radeon Software 18.40 release, the only listed change for this quarterly driver update is support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 / SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15. In addition to supporting SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, the Radeon Software 18.40 driver package is also available for RHEL/CentOS 7.5, RHEL/CentOS 6.10, Ubuntu 18.04.1, and Ubuntu 16.04.5.

The Radeon Software 18.40 driver can be downloaded from AMD.com. Out of curiosity sake in the days ahead I'll work on some fresh Radeon Software vs. Mesa Git benchmarks.