AMD News Archives

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Zen 2 and newer processors has been working out well in its roughly two years of being in the mainline Linux kernel. The AMD P-State driver has helped with ensuring modern Ryzen systems are delivering optimal performance and power efficiency. Recently AMD Linux engineers have been working on a few fixes and enhancements to this CPUFreq driver.

AMD's upstreaming effort around Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) to the mainline Linux kernel appears to be nearly wrapped up with the latest hypervisor patches now at their fourteenth revision.

AMD is using the Embedded World conference in Bavaria for today introducing their Versal Series Gen 2 SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. Today's embargo lift covers the Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 and Versal Prime Series Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs.

Following the launch last week of the AMD Ryzen Embedded 8000 Series, SolidRun today announced the Bedrock R8000 as the first industrial PCs designed around these new Ryzen Embedded 8000 series SoCs.

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded 8000 series processors -- their first AMD embedded chips to offer Ryzen AI with the onboard Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This AMD XDNA NPU support is similar to the existing Ryzen AI on the Ryzen 8000 series.

With the first quarter drawing to a close, here's a recap of the most exciting AMD Linux/open-source news from the quarter. During the past three months we've seen AMD finally publish their XDNA Linux driver for open-source Ryzen AI support, their open-source HDMI driver efforts were sadly rejected by the HDMI Forum, the AMD Zen 5 "znver5" compiler support was added to GCC 14, more AMD Zen 5 Linux kernel preparations made, and various other AMD Linux driver enhancements landed.

Disclosed last August was the AMD Inception vulnerability also known as SRSO for the Speculative Return Stack Overflow. The kernel-side patches for the AMD SRSO mitigation were quickly merged. Following that were more clean-ups and fixes to the SRSO mitigation code. It's been a quiet few months since while merged on Friday was fixing some of the mitigation code due to being ineffective.

While there is AOMP for OpenMP device offloading based on the LLVM/Clang compiler, less talked about and not as feature-rich is the AMDGCN back-end within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that is also worked on for OpenMP device offloading capabilities to Radeon GPUs. Squeezing in for the upcoming GCC 14.1 stable release is GFX1103 support for AMD APUs with RDNA3 integrated graphics.

More AMD SEV-SNP bits are upstreamed now for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel that is putting the EPYC processor support on the mainline kernel trajectory for "the ultimate goal of the AMD confidential computing side" to hopefully be in great shape come Linux 6.10 later in the year.

Back in February AMD posted GCC compiler enablement support for Zen 5 with the new "znver5" target ahead of launch. Since then it's been rather quiet and nervous not seeing this support merged ahead of the upcoming GCC 14 stable release, but this morning it's finally happened: the AMD Zen 5 processor enablement has been merged to GCC Git in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release that will be out in the coming weeks.

While AMD P-State driver's Preferred Core support was merged for Linux 6.9, another notable addition to this driver is still undergoing the patch review process: Core Performance Boost.

AMD's HIP Ray-Tracing library "HIP RT" has been one of the few projects under the GPUOpen umbrella that starts off as closed-source software but then is eventually open-sourced... That happened now with the HIP ray-tracing code becoming publicly available.

With the upgraded Linux kernel, compiler, and other software upgrades with next month's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, those using recent AMD EPYC server processors like the 4th Gen EPYC Genoa(X) / Bergamo / Siena processors stand to benefit from greater performance over the current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release.

An interesting anecdote was mentioned as part of the x86/misc changes queued for the Linux 6.9 kernel: on some unnamed AMD systems, NMI debug messages were too excessive that they actually slowed down the systems.

The in-development Linux 6.9 kernel is finally landing support for AMD Preferred Core as part of the power management updates for this mid-2024 kernel release.

While Linux 6.8 carries some elements of Zen 5 CPU support, more upstream Linux enablement for the next-generation AMD processors remains ongoing. Sent out this morning were the initial patches around AMD Zen 5 performance monitoring and events for the perf subsystem.

A number of x86-related pull requests were already submitted today for kicking off the new Linux 6.9 merge window. With the x86/cpu pull for this new kernel cycle there is just one patch and it's for slightly easing future AMD Zen processor enablement under Linux.

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver works with Zen 2 and newer processors supporting ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) but to date this hasn't worked for Threadripper 3000 series processors with the TRX40 chipset. That though is finally being fixed up with Linux 6.9 thanks to a one-line code change.

AMD engineers and those debugging s2idle suspend/resume issues for Ryzen laptops under Linux will soon have more information at disposal for newer SoCs supporting MP2 STB functionality.

Queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle is an FRU Memory Poison Manager "FMPM" developed by AMD that may later be adapted for other non-AMD platforms. The FRU Memory Poison Manager is working to persist information around known bad/faulty memory across reboots.

George Hotz with Tiny Corp that is working on Tinygrad and TinyBox for interesting developments in the open-source AI space has previously called out AMD over ROCm issues. Yesterday yielded new tweets by "the tiny corp" over AI training runs crashing with MES errors and then called for AMD open-sourcing the firmware to which AMD CEO Lisa Su has responded.

For those interested in FPGAs, AMD today unveiled the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA product family with hardware coming in 2025.

As many enthusiasts wait to hear from AMD more broadly supporting ROCm in an official capacity across consumer Radeon GPUs and/or hearing about better supporting more Linux distributions outside of the major enterprise Linux distributions, today AMD announced a new medium for their communications with the community: the "New AMD ROCm Software Blog Platform" will be rolling out.

For the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle there are a number of AMD Instinct MI300 additions to the EDAC (Error Detection And Correction) and RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) drivers.

Making for a very exciting Saturday morning, AMD just posted their initial enablement patch for plumbing Zen 5 processor support "znver5" into the GNU Compiler Collection! With GCC 14 due to be released as stable in March~April as usual for the annual compiler release, it's been frustrating to see no Zen 5 support even while Intel has already been working on Clear Water Forest and Panther Lake support with already having upstreamed Sierra Forest, Granite Rapids, and other new CPU targets months ago... Well, Granite Rapids was added to GCC in late 2022. But squeezing in as what should now be merged in time is the initial AMD Zen 5 support!

Last year at FOSDEM 2023 there was a presentation on the state of AMD open-source firmware and since then a lot has changed from the AMD openSIL announcement to new platforms being in the process of being enabled. At FOSDEM 2024 this past weekend in Brussels was a fresh look at the current state of AMD open-source firmware.

The AMD ROCm Debugger "ROCgdb" is maintained as a fork of the GNU Debugger (GDB) with support added for the heterogeneous debugging of the ROCm compute platform. ROCgdb works well and is distributed as part of the ROCM stack. The good news is that AMD is also working on getting this AMDGPU/ROCm debug support added into the upstream GDB debugger.

More of AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) support for memory encrypted VMs is set to make it upstream for the Linux 6.9 kernel coming out toward the middle of the year.

Since last August AMD Linux engineers have been working on P-State Preferred Core support for the "amd_pstate" driver so that this functionality can be leveraged under Linux for improved task placement.

AMD on Wednesday evening released ROCm 6.0.2 as the newest point release to their open-source compute stack.

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for improved thermal/power/performance behavior under Linux works for Zen 2 and newer systems where the platform exposes ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) support. There's been a caveat though of the "amd_pstate" driver having issues for the Zen2-based Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series. With a newly-published set of patches, that issue should be resolved.

For AMD Zen 2 and newer systems making use of the modern AMD P-State driver on Linux for CPU frequency scaling, ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) interface is being used. For managing the ACPI CPPC energy performance preference (EPP), Intel's x86_energy_perf_policy utility is now being extended to AMD processors.

As I wrote about at the start of January, the open-source ATI Radeon R300 Linux graphics driver continues seeing new improvements even all these years later thanks to the open-source community. This wasn't some one-off work either in 2024 for this R300 to R500 GPU OpenGL driver but more work has since landed.

New code submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.8 cycle are some AMD additions now set for premiering in today's Linux 6.8-rc2 release.

While not quite as exciting as yesterday's AMD XDNA driver publishing for Ryzen AI on Linux, a notable patch series out of AMD today on the Linux front is enabling AMD Core Performance Boost controls within their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

With the AMD Ryzen 7040 series "Ryzen AI" was introduced as leveraging Xilinx IP onboard the new Zen 4 mobile processors. Ryzen AI is beginning to work its way out to more processors while it hasn't been supported on Linux. Then in October was AMD wanting to hear from customer requests around Ryzen AI Linux support. Well, today they did their first public code drop of the XDNA Linux driver for providing open-source support for Ryzen AI.

As the first new tagged version of AMD's AOMP LLVM-based OpenMP-focused compiler for offloading to their Instinct / Radeon GPUs, AOMP 18.0-1 was released today with many changes.

One of the features sadly not having made it in time for the Linux v6.8 kernel merge window is the AMD P-State Preferred Core support. This is about being able to properly communicate to the kernel and scheduler about "preferred cores" such as cases of some CPU cores having higher maximum frequencies or better performance characteristics than others. This is becoming more important with AMD Ryzen processors beginning to see a combination of Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores and other cases like AMD 3D V-Cache enabled processors where some cores would be preferred over others for performance sensitive work.

The tooling changes around the perf subsystem have been submitted for the Linux 6.8 kernel merge window and provide some new hardware features and other new perf profiling capabilities.

System76 has opted to offer new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors in their Thelio Major desktop line-up to provide for greater performance from AI and creator workloads to all common code compilation and other tasks leveraging many CPU cores/threads. The new System76 Thelio Major powered by Zen 4 Threadripper is being shown off this week at CES 2024 in Las Vegas at AMD's booth. A review on the new Thelio Major workstation will also be forthcoming on Phoronix.

The x86 CPU pull request is ready for the Linux 6.8 kernel and besides adding new AMD Zen feature flags easily isolating different CPU generations, there is also an AMD CPU optimization to avoid an unnecessary MFENCE+LFENCE barrier.

A few months back AMD announced the MicroBlaze V processor as a soft-core RISC-V processor for embedded system use. With Linux 6.8 the necessary DeviceTree support is landing for the AMD MicroBlaze V.

In the land of odd hardware bugs and interesting Linux kernel behavior, a fix was merged today for Linux 6.7 and to be back-ported to existing stable kernel series for dealing with a situation where unexpected system reboots could happen primarily on AMD Ryzen systems when using Firewire (IEEE-1394).

AMD's open-source Linux software engineers continue preparing the Linux kernel for supporting next-generation Zen 5 processors.

Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week in Las Vegas, AMD announced today the Versal AI Edge XA Adaptive SoC and the Ryzen Embedded V2000A Series processor. The Ryzen Embedded V2000A is an x86 automotive-qualified processor family for next-generation automotive digital cockpits. Given the automotive/embedded focus, Linux plays a big role with the forthcoming hardware and its adoption by multiple automotive companies.

AMD engineers are proposing an FPGA Subsystem User-Space Interface to overcome current limitations of the Linux kernel's FPGA manager subsystem.

The AMD Address Translation Library (ATL) is cleaning up and centralizing existing code within the Linux kernel for Zen-based systems. After being reviewed on the kernel mailing list, the AMD ATL is set to be introduced as part of the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle.

As part of the various end-of-year Phoronix articles, here's a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news stories and reviews of 2023.

This New Year's weekend brought the latest AMD patches working on plumbing the mainline Linux kernel with the hypervisor support around AMD Secure Nested Paging (SNP) as part of their Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). SEV-SNP has been supported since EPYC 7003 series and while some elements of the support have been upstreamed for securing VMs, some bits remain.

One of the big milestones we are looking forward to in 2024 is the introduction of AMD Zen 5 processors. AMD Linux engineers have in recent months begun getting ready for those next-generation processors that look like will be Family 26 (1Ah) processors. We've been seeing more of the AMD "1Ah" patches and some more were posted today for some post-Christmas excitement before the new year.