Samuel Pitoiset of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team landed some changes on Thursday to the open-source RADV driver within Mesa around GPU checks for the hardware supported by this popular AMD Vulkan driver on Linux systems.
First up, in case you were ever wondering, one of the patches now officially confirms the AMD CDNA is unsupported by RADV. Trying to load the RADV driver on a CDNA part such as the AMD Instinct accelerators will now bail out. The patch message simply says:
“No access to the [hardware] and likely broken.”
Not surprising but for those curious… Back when I had remote access to eight Instinct MI300X accelerators, I hadn’t tried it at the time. Not that you’d want to try RADV on Instinct/CDNA for headless/remote gaming or the like, but one possible use would be for Vulkan compute… Granted, AMD is working hard on the ROCm story, but for those curious about Vulkan compute on Instinct/CDNA, it’s not supported at least with the Mesa RADV driver. I haven’t seen any confirmation one way or the other on AMD’s AMDVLK or closed-source alternative Vulkan drivers on CDNA but presumably not since ROCm is their preferred approach to GPU compute.
The other patch merged by Samuel Pitoiset is having the RADV driver bail out if newer than GFX12. GFX12 is the upcoming RDNA4 graphics with the Radeon RX 90×0 series. Now the RADV driver is being conservative that if by chance you have some engineering sample or anything newer than GFX12, the RADV driver won’t try to use it now since it would be presumably broken/unsupported.
These new RADV support checks will be part of the upcoming Mesa 25.0 release.
