Radeon Software For Linux 22.20 Driver Prepared With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, RHEL 9.0 Support

For consumer Radeon GPUs the "Radeon Software for Linux" packaged driver version has been on the 22.10 series since the end of March. For AMD Radeon PRO professional/workstation graphics the advertised "Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise on Linux" driver is still the 21.Q4 driver from last December. AMD appears to be finally prepping to release the "22.20" packaged driver as the next feature release to this packaged AMD Linux driver stack for those not relying just on the upstream kernel and Mesa.

The Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver versions primarily aim for enterprise/professional users running enterprise Linux distributions like SUSE, Ubuntu, and RHEL/CentOS. Gamers and others running bleeding-edge Linux distributions are normally best off just running those upstream Linux kernel / Mesa components for the best support unless needing OpenCL/ROCm or having a workload where the proprietary Vulkan driver happens to perform better.

It's been a while since the last packaged Radeon Linux driver update -- and now more than six months since the last enterprise Linux driver release -- but 22.20 has been uploaded to the AMD package archive. AMD hasn't yet announced the 22.20 driver but it appeared overnight via the repo.radeon.com where the installer fetches the necessary package binaries.

Without the AMD.com announcement yet the formal release notes haven't been published for detailing all what has changed in this new packaged Linux driver release. What is most notable though when going through the Radeon repository is now having an entry for Jammy -- in other words, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will now be supported. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS released back in April but AMD hadn't provided any "same day" support and now as we roll into July it looks like they will have their official Ubuntu 22.04 support ready.

Likewise, the new 22.20 packages are also the first supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 on the RHEL side. RHEL 9.0 reached general availability in May. On the SUSE side, the recently released SUSE Enterprise Linux 15 SP4 is also now supported.

So at least the enterprise Linux distributions will all be supported by this imminent 22.20 series packaged Linux driver, now just waiting for the formal release on AMD.com for looking at the release notes for other notable changes. The 22.20 packages can be downloaded from repo.radeon.com ahead of the official announcement.