Yesterday brought the eighth and ninth iteration of the AMD XDNA Linux kernel driver posted for review for enabling the Ryzen AI branded NPUs found in their recent SoCs.
On Monday the AMD XDNA v8 driver patches were posted for review followed by another iteration of that due to a miss-merged line accidentally in the v8 patches. This open-source kernel driver continues to be refined by AMD for supporting the AMD Ryzen AI NPUs that have been found in the Ryzen laptops for roughly the past two years.
The AMD XDNA kernel driver goes along with AMD’s XRT and AIE Plugin for IREE user-space components for getting AI workloads like ONNX RT working atop the neural processing unit hardware. The AMD XDNA kernel driver is open-source but does depend upon a closed-source binary, similar to the state of most GPU drivers these days.
It was just early in 2024 that AMD made the XDNA kernel driver code public on GitHub while the past few months have been working on getting the code reviewed to get it upstreamed for the mainline kernel. But as far as when this AMD Ryzen AI kernel driver will be upstreamed remains to be seen. The driver is settling down and there has been less churn between XDNA driver revisions. The Linux 6.13 merge window is slated to open next week and will then be open for the following two weeks. But with the v8/v9 patches only published yesterday, it remains to be seen if upstream maintainers are happy with the latest condition of the driver and if they’ll be comfortable ushering it along for the Linux v6.13 cycle. Otherwise we’re looking at Linux v6.14 for the AMD XDNA driver to potentially be merged and then will be found in stable Linux distributions in the spring~summer of 2025.
Those wanting to try out the latest AMD XDNA kernel driver now for Ryzen AI hardware can find it on the Linux kernel mailing list.
