Navi 14 AMDGPU Firmware Lands In The Linux-Firmware.Git Tree

Just one day after announcing the Radeon RX 5500 series as the first Navi 14 GPUs, AMD has submitted the firmware binaries to the linux-firmware.git tree that are required for usage with the open-source Linux graphics driver.

This easy availability of the firmware bits is the last piece of the puzzle for rounding out their Linux driver support. On the kernel side Linux 5.4 has the initial Navi 14 support albeit is disabled by default unless using the experimental feature bit. Mesa 19.2 also has the preliminary Navi 14 support in the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers, but I would recommend using Mesa 19.3-devel for the best feature coverage and performance. And then there's LLVM 9.0+ for the AMDGPU back-end, particularly with the RADV ACO back-end not yet having stable support for Navi. Lastly there are these necessary binary blobs now in linux-firmware.git for rounding out the Navi 14 GPU initialization.

So with that, all of the components are now public / readily available for lighting up Navi 14 graphics cards as far as graphics are concerned. Though due to the timing, not found out-of-the-box for the likes of the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 or Fedora 31. Nevertheless, as soon as we get our hands on the AMD Radeon RX 5500 we will be sharing our experiences on how this bleeding edge Linux support is panning out for gamers.

The one piece of Navi Linux support still missing is OpenCL/compute for which there is Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) but still no indication when they will be providing Navi support there.