Since March we have been seeing patches from AMD software engineers [1]beginning to enable their next-generation "AIE4" NPU platform under Linux. We still don't know for sure when this AIE4 NPU will premiere for sure in new Ryzen AI products, but the Linux enablement continues coming along nicely for the AMDXDNA accelerator driver.

At the end of April the new AMD AIE4 NPU hardware support [2]began queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.2 merge window. Now additional AIE4 enablement code has worked its way into drm-misc-next and submitted to DRM-Next for this next kernel version.

Today's drm-misc-next pull request contains more of the AIE4 driver implementation with handling device partitioning, command doorbell and wait support, buffer initialization, and other work -- including the SR-IOV Virtual Function (VF) bits with [3]SR-IOV appearing to be supported for this next-gen NPU .

Given the timing of this AIE4 enablement in AMDXDNA, it would be logical that the new NPU could be found with AMD's Ryzen AI Zen 6 "Medusa Point" platform, but there's no official confirmation there at this time. Whatever the case, it's nice to see the hardware support coming ahead of time -- especially with how late the AMDXDNA driver introduction was following the initial AMD NPUs appearing in laptops.

In addition to continued AMD AIE4 enablement for AMDXDNA, today's drm-misc-next pull also brings deferred mapping support to the VirtIO driver, support for more eDP panels, support for the RCade Display Adapter in the GUD driver, and various bug fixes.

See [4]this pull for this week's batch of drm-misc-next changes that are ready for introduction in next month's Linux 7.2 merge window.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-AIE4-NPU-AMDXDNA

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.2-Initial-DRM-Misc-Next

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Ryzen-AI-SR-IOV-VF

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/98788814-e462-4950-bb2a-ea493c30d0c0@linux.intel.com/