AMDXDNA Submitted For Linux 6.14 With Kernel Accelerator/Graphics Driver Updates

Due to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) lead maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat going on holidays the next two weeks, he’s preemptively submitted the DRM/accelerator feature pull request ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window officially opening.

Most notable with this DRM pull request for Linux 6.14 is the introduction of a new driver: AMDXDNA. This is the kernel accelerator driver for supporting Ryzen AI NPUs under Linux. After being out-of-tree the past year and being late to the party as-is in supporting Ryzen AI NPUs under Linux, the mainline Linux 6.14 kernel will have this driver to begin enabling Ryzen AI neural processing unit use by Linux distributions. This was expected to happen for Linux 6.14 and good to see it finally happening. Besides the AMDXDNA kernel driver and needed firmware binaries, the AMD Xilinx XRT and AMD AIE Plugin for IREE software are the user-space components currently available for leveraging the AMD NPU.

Linux 6.14 DRM is also adding the new device memory “DMEM” cgroup support to allow limiting GPU vRAM use initially for Intel discrete graphics cards but this DMEM support can be extended to other drivers/hardware with dedicated device memory.

The Intel Xe and i915 kernel graphics drivers in Linux 6.14 are also bringing SR-IOV PF scheduling priority, more accuracy engine busyness metric reporting with GuC, new GSC firmware handling for Arrow Lake H and Arrow Lake U systems, HDCP fixes in the early Xe3 LPD / Panther Lake code, and UHBR rates for Thunderbolt. Next-gen Panther Lake is set to support Ultra-High Bit Rate (UHBR) mode for DisplayPort with Thunderbolt in Alt-Mode. The Intel Linux kernel graphics driver was missing the UHBR modes for 10G and 20G modes. UHBR 10 allows for 40 Gbps bandwidth and UHBR 20 at 80 Gbps. Plus the Linux 6.14 DRM pull on the Intel side also brings other improvements / code refactoring to the modern Xe kernel driver.

The AMDGPU kernel graphics driver is adding DRM Panic support for that Linux “Blue Screen of Death” solution, cleaner shader support for RDNA2 dGPUs, DCN 3.5 updates, various RDNA4 / GFX12 improvements, GC 9.5 updates for preparing Instinct MI350, and other improvements. The AMDKFD kernel compute driver is also working on GC 9.5 support, logging improvements, and other code clean-ups.

The MSM kernel driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware adds support for the Qualcomm QCS615 / SM6150 and other improvements. The Arm Panfrost driver adds Mediatek MT8188 Mali-G57 MC3 for Linux 6.14. Also in the Arm space, the HiSilicon driver adds HiBMC support.

Some of the other smaller changes include the virtual VKMS driver adding line-per-line compositing algorithm to improve performance, the AMD-Xilinx Zynqmp driver adding DisplayPort audio support, and VirtIO-GPU supporting PRIME for scanout buffers. Last but not least the VC4 DRM driver adds support for the Broadcom BCM2712 for the Raspberry Pi 5.

The early Linux 6.14 DRM pull request can be found on the kernel mailing list ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window expected to open next week, assuming Linux 6.13 makes it out on time this Sunday (19 January).