Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 Released

Quietly released last week by AMD was their Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 driver providing the latest packaged "Open" and "PRO" (Closed) driver components for use within enterprise Linux environments.

Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 is their first public packaged driver update since April when Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 debuted with initial support for Vulkan ray-tracing.

The public change-log for the Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 mentions RHEL / CentOS 8.4 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 operating system support. No other changes are mentioned but both the Open and PRO driver components should be updated against their more recent upstream and internal states, so it's worth testing to see what all might be changed. In particular, we are eager to test Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 to see if the Vulkan ray-tracing support and performance is in any better standing. Stay tuned for tests.

Last week AMD did announce pre-Polaris GPU and pre-Raven APU support is now considered legacy and not being supported moving forward in their future Radeon Software Windows drivers. At least with this latest Radeon Software for Linux release, GPU support going back to the Radeon R9 285/290/290X (GCN 1.2) is still listed as supported along with the likes of the RX 300 series and R9 Fury. We'll see in the next release if they decide to limit it to Polaris and newer. Considering AMDVLK just dropped pre-Polaris support we'll likely see the case there at least for their OpenGL/Vulkan PRO driver components while the upstream Linux kernel and Mesa drivers continue supporting many generations of AMD (and back to ATI) Radeon graphics.

The Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 driver is available for download at AMD.com. Officially supported Linux distributions for this packaged driver are Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04.5, RHEL/CentOS 7.9, RHEL/CentOS 8.4, and SUSE SLED/SLES 15 SP3.