With the great upstream support for AMD Radeon graphics in the Linux kernel and Mesa, most desktop users / gamers / enthusiasts are best off just using the latest code shipped by their distributions or via the enthusiast-supported third-party archives/repositories. But for those on older enterprise Linux distributions, Radeon Software for Linux 25.20.3 was recently released for shipping that packaged AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This 25.20 series is the big one where they are now officially supporting the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver in place of their own former Vulkan Linux driver.
Back in May was the announcement from AMD that they would be dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux in favor of using the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers shipped by Mesa. They said that change-over would happen for the Radeon Software for Linux 25.20 release and now it’s publicly available with the v25.20.3 build.
This Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver update actually happened last week but happened quietly given the waning need for the packaged driver these days. I’ve been routinely checking the driver support page out of curiosity and then only realized the release took place today after checking with the ROCm 7.1.1 release.
Sure enough, the change-over happened with Mesa RADV and RadeonSI Gallium3D used by default. AMD AMF also is removed as planned in favor of going with the Gallium3D VA-API state tracker:
“This release marks a significant milestone, featuring exclusively Open-Source software
The Mesa Vulkan driver is now officially supported, complementing the existing, robust Mesa OpenGL component. To maintain a 100% open-source core, the AMD proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers are no longer included.
AMF is no longer included. AMF users are advised to transition to the open-standard VA-API / Mesa Multimedia for continued hardware video acceleration.”
Besides Gallium3D VA, the RADV Vulkan driver also supports the Vulkan Video extensions with that video acceleration encode/decode API also continuing to see more adoption.
The Radeon Software for Linux 25.20.3 release also adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 support (it’s about time) while dropping RHEL 8.10 support. The officially supported Linux distributions by this packaged driver are Ubuntu 22.04.5, Ubuntu 24.04.3, RHEL 9.6, RHEL 10.0, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP7. Those on newer Linux distributions like Ubuntu 25.10 or Fedora Linux are best off just using their latest built-in packages.
The Radeon Software for Linux 25.20.3 release can be downloaded from AMD.com.
