Back in March AMD announced the open-source GAIA software for GenAI but as noted in that former article, at launch it was limited to Windows-only support. AMD recently released a new version of GAIA with Linux support albeit in a rather interesting twist is limited to Vulkan acceleration.
AMD GAIA is described as an open-source solution from the company for running large language model (LLM) agents on Ryzen AI PCs “in minutes” by having both a GUI and command line interface and building off the likes of Lemonade and Llama.cpp.
At launch it was limited to Windows-only support and thus quickly fell off my radar. But a Phoronix reader recently raised GAIA again and I was pleased to see there is now Linux support as of last month.
AMD GAIA 0.10 released back on 20 August and now comes with Linux support. But the Linux support is rather interesting in terms of hardware/driver targets:
“Linux Support – Native CLI and UI (RAUX) support for Ubuntu with unified cross-platform installation (currently supports iGPU via llama.cpp/Vulkan backend using the Lemonade server)”
While GAIA was developed in part for showcasing Ryzen AI NPU potential, the Linux support at this point doesn’t mention any NPU coverage with the new AMDXDNA driver. It also doesn’t mention ROCm. But rather is using Llama.cpp’s Vulkan back-end with the Lemonade Server.
With using Llama.cpp’s Vulkan back-end it should also work for discrete Radeon GPUs and even other vendor GPUs barring any arbitrary vendor checks, but as GAIA is designed around Ryzen AI SoCs, it just mentions iGPUs. But still not showcasing NPUs with the mainline AMDXDNA driver is a bit peculiar or rather telling.
As showcased recently, Llama.cpp’s Vulkan back-end at times can outperform the AMD ROCm back-end at least for some Radeon hardware.
The situation of AMD GAIA on Linux just using Vulkan for GPUs and foregoing initial NPU support left me perplexed. Digging through the GitHub repository, there is this comment from June from an AMD engineer:
“Quick update on Linux support, the LLM tool GAIA uses under the hood built by our team called Lemonade is now supporting Linux via llama.cpp/Vulkan backend. @CleverLittleMaker, this means you’ll be able to run any GGUF model on your AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB system using the Ryzen AI CPU or iGPU (NPU support will come later).
GAIA support for Linux will also follow shortly in about 1-2 weeks. Thank you all for the feedback, we take it seriously and try to build the tools that matter most to everyone here.”
Noting NPU support will “come later” without any specifics but again reaffirming their Vulkan API use on Linux for Llama.cpp.
Since last month’s v0.10 release, GAIA 0.10.1 released last week with some general fixes and build improvements but no further mentions of Linux enhancements.
