Updated Radeon Software 18.50 Linux Driver Tacks On Radeon VII Support

For those uncomfortable in building your own Linux kernel and Mesa in order to attain Radeon VII support (or don't want to leverage third-party package repositories), there is a new Radeon Software for Linux driver release now available with Radeon VII support.

Today's Radeon Software driver for Radeon VII on Linux is the same release stream as what shipped back in December: 18.50.

Besides adding support for second-generation Vega / Radeon VII, the only other change listed in the public release notes is the RHEL / CentOS 7.6 support, which was part of the original changes in the December driver update.

Radeon Software 18.50 includes both the proprietary and "open" driver stacks. If using the open components, the Mesa build is still derived from Mesa 18.2, as a forewarning. So if you are comfortable in building from Mesa Git or using one of the many third-party package archives for non-rolling-release distros, you'll be able to find much newer RadeonSI support that way. The AMDGPU DKMS kernel bits are based on Linux 4.18 plus with various patches (namely all the Vega 20 work) added in.

This updated driver can be found at AMD.com. As is standard practice for the AMD packaged driver updates on Linux, towards the end of the quarter (next month), we should see a larger driver update out bringing it onto a new release stream.

Some more @Radeon #RadeonVII #Linux benchmarks wrapping up shortly... pic.twitter.com/tLF8zS939c

— Phoronix (@phoronix) February 7, 2019

And in case you didn't read our Radeon VII Linux review yet, be sure to do so for a lot of interesting benchmarks while more are on the way.