Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The only driver I'm aware of is the AMDGPU driver in the Linux kernel. It is updated with every release of Linux and is used for all modern AMD GPUs. I find that the drivers generally work well. My complaints are more about the user space libraries.

The good news is that I have at least one AMD GPU of each architecture from Vega to RDNA 3 / CDNA 2 on the Debian ROCm CI. Debian Trixie has packages built and tested for every modern discrete AMD GPU from Vega to RDNA 3 / CDNA 2. (I'd have liked to include RDNA 4 / CDNA 3, but the effort was quite resource constrained and the packages are a bit old. I'm hoping to improve upon that going forward, but Trixie is already in feature freeze so it will have to wait for the next release.)

I personally own much of the equipment for the Debian ROCm CI and I can promise I will continue testing new releases on old hardware for a very long time.




whats the plan for the AMD NPUs such as https://frame.work/desktop


The driver for AMD's XDNA NPU landed in Linux 6.14 [1]. However, the Xilinx AI runtime still needs to be packaged. That may take some time. The NPU runtime stack is based on the Xilinx AI toolchain, which is not yet as mature as the ROCm stack. There are a few related packages in Debian, but AMD and Debian both have a lot of work to do to get support for the NPU integrated into the distribution. I probably won't directly be doing the packaging of the runtime, but I've been helping to nudge the process along.

It's perhaps worth mentioning that Framework has directly supported Debian in providing access to hardware with AMD NPUs and iGPUs. I'm typing this message on one of two Framework 13 laptops that they donated to support Debian in this effort. I will be using it both for testing gfx1103 support on Debian and for testing the NPU packages when they become available. Framework also generously offered to provide one of those desktop systems you linked for the Debian ROCm CI [2]. It would also be used as a CI worker for the NPU runtime libraries once those are packaged.

[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-614-features [2]: https://ci.rocm.debian.net/




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: