Radeon Software for Linux 22.20 Released With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Support

While AMD is normally fairly good at promptly supporting major new enterprise Linux distribution releases from Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical (Ubuntu), this time around with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it's taken just shy of three months since the official release for them to formally release a new packaged driver supporting it.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ships with Linux 5.15 and Mesa 22.0 that for most users is good enough for OpenGL and Vulkan support. But if wanting the packaged driver for fixes/features found past Linux 5.15, needing the ROCm OpenCL compute support bundled with the packaged driver, or needing the proprietary OpenGL/Vulkan drivers for whatever reason, AMD hasn't offered Ubuntu 22.04 LTS support until yesterday.

On Thursday AMD finally published the Radeon Software for Linux 22.20 driver that has Ubuntu 22.04 LTS support and early support for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04.1 point release -- not particularly surprising since with 22.04.1 there is no new hardware enablement (HWE) stack / no new kernel to deal with supporting. Plus there is early support too for the Ubuntu 20.04.5 hardware enablement stack.

The Radeon Software for Linux 22.20 driver also adds support for the recently released SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 (SLED / SLES 15 SP4) releases. These 22.20 changes are the same as what I mentioned at the end of June when they began uploading the packages to their archive, but it took now three weeks for this driver to be formally released on AMD.com.

Aside from the updated enterprise Linux driver support, there are no other listed changes as part of the Radeon Software for Linux 22.20 driver compared to the months old 22.10 release, but surely newer versions of the AMDGPU DKMS module, updated OpenGL and Vulkan drivers, etc. Their public release notes for the packaged Linux driver have remained quite sad over the years.

The updated Radeon Software for Linux 22.20 driver is available for download now on AMD.com. This is their driver intended for the "consumer" Radeon graphics cards. If navigating though to the AMD Radeon PRO driver area, the latest "Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise" Linux driver remains 21.Q4 from last December. While AMD released their updated PRO Edition Windows driver in June for their professional graphics cards, for reasons unknown they haven't yet updated their Radeon Software for Enterprise Linux driver now in over a half-year.