Radeon VII (Vega 20) Firmware Support Lands In Linux-Firmware.Git

In addition to needing a recent version of the Linux kernel and Mesa (ideally, Linux 5.0 and Mesa 19.0 if enjoying the very best performance and features) for using a Radeon VII graphics card on Linux, you also need to have the necessary firmware binaries manually installed if not using the Radeon Software for Linux driver package. Those firmware bits are now in the linux-firmware.git repository.

If using the Radeon Software for Linux driver package the Vega 20 binary bits have already been shipping as part of it as well as with ROCm 2.0, but for the first few days of the Radeon VII if otherwise wanting to grab the firmware yourself, there's been the de facto location on AMD developer Alex Deucher's site. But now these firmware binaries have been pulled into linux-firmware.git as the standard repository where Linux distributions pull from for the firmware they ship on their platforms -- well, aside from the libre distributions like Trisquel and others that go without any binary firmware support.

As of this commit, all the Vega 20 firmware files for Radeon VII are now in place. Rolling release distributions should end up seeing an updated linux-firmware package soon while for the non-rolling-release distributions they generally don't ship new firmware updates until their next OS release.

If you missed it from last week see our Radeon VII Linux benchmarks as well as the Linux kernel and Mesa comparison tests with this 7nm consumer GPU. More Radeon VII Linux tests are forthcoming on Phoronix.