While most Linux enthusiasts and desktop users/gamers are comfortable just riding the latest upstream Linux kernel and Mesa drivers shipped by their distribution, for those enterprises preferring the officially blessed and QA'ed driver packages from AMD, last week marked the release of the Radeon Software for Linux 26.12 driver.

Since abandoning AMDVLK and proprietary Vulkan/OpenGL driver components, the packaged Radeon Software for Linux driver has been even less important and used given the great upstream open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver support. Quietly released last week was their Radeon Software for Linux 26.12 driver drop that supports all GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer both from the Radeon consumer line and the Radeon PRO and FIrePro products too.

One month after the official Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, this new AMD Radeon Software for Linux unified driver package is now officially supporting this latest Ubuntu Long Term Support release. In turn AMD also decided to phase out their Ubuntu 22.04 LTS support.

In addition to supporting Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, the Radeon Software for Linux 26.12 driver package added support for architecture-specific ROCm packages to reduce the overall download and installation size. There is also now automatic GPU detection as part of the amdgpu-install script to ease the installation process.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS along with RHEL 10.1 and RHEL 9.7 are the officially supported Linux distributions for this unified driver package.

Those wanting to try out this Radeon Software For Linux 26.12 packaged release can find it at [1]AMD.com .



[1] https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/release-notes/RN-AMDGPU-UNIFIED-LINUX-26-12.html