AMD News Archives

The AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" driver is set to see some enhancements come the Linux 6.14 merge window.

Eric Biggers of Google who has pursued countless CPU optimizations within the Linux kernel's crypto subsystem over the years has some noteworthy optimizations coming for AMD processors with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.

Since AMD Zen 3 processors there has been the INVLPGB instruction for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. As mentioned back during the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch, INVLPGB usage around this new instruction was limited... Over the past nearly four years the INVLPGB use has been limited in part because Intel CPUs do not support it but there is now a Linux kernel patch series for making use of INVLPGB for some nice performance benefits.

If you are looking for some interesting technical content to watch over the holidays or end-of-year downtime, AMD shared today that they have launched their own YouTube channel for developer-related content.

The latest round of drm-misc-next material was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window.

Of the many new features in Linux 6.13 for that kernel debuting by late January, AMD customers once again have a lot to look forward to from new Zen 5 features being enabled to additional performance optimizations. Here is a look at some of the most exciting new AMD features and improvements with this first major Linux kernel release coming for 2025.

Back in August AMD posted Linux patches for L3 Smart Data Cache Injection Allocation Enforcement (SDCIAE). That L3 Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) work was since announced as part of the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. A second iteration of those SDCIAE were posted this week in working to get this functionality enabled for the mainline Linux kernel.

AOMP 20.0-1 was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this LLVM/Clang downstream focused on shipping the latest AMD patches around Radeon/Instinct OpenMP accelerator offload support.

System76 has been offering AMD-powered Linux laptops for a few years now and before rounding out 2024 they have announced the new Pangolin "Pang15" laptop with an updated SoC, 2K display with 16:10 screen ratio and 120Hz refresh rate, and other refinements to this all-aluminum build Linux laptop.

For further enhancing the AMD EPYC virtualization experience on Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.14 looks like it will support Zen 5's new RMPREAD instruction and segmented RMP mode as part of Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP).

For those with the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS as a ~$230 USD AM5 motherboard for Ryzen 7000/9000 series processors, this desktop motherboard is seeing support tacked onto the asus-ec-sensors hardware monitoring driver so you can enjoy working sensor readings under Linux.

While there are many great new features in Linux 6.13 like the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver, one of the features that wasn't buttoned up in time for this current kernel cycle were the patches implementing the AMD Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI). But that work remains ongoing and last week brought the seventh iteration of the patches.

While Linux 6.13-rc1 was only released this past Sunday and there is around two months to go until the start of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle, AMD P-State driver improvements are already beginning to collect for this next kernel cycle.

The "AMDXDNA" accelerator driver for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU is set to be introduced in the Linux 6.14 kernel next year. Ahead of that debut, a new set of patches from AMD surfaced on Wednesday to provide fixes and code improvements as well as introducing support for newer Ryzen AI "NPU6" IP.

With the AMDXDNA kernel driver for Ryzen AI NPU support on Linux now ready for merging and is queued in drm-misc-next for the Linux 6.14 kernel early next year, the AMD NPU firmware binaries have also now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for having the necessary firmware support in place.

While the Linux 6.13 merge window just closed yesterday in landing all of the new features and functionality for that first kernel version of 2025, already for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle to follow a feature was queued up early this morning in a TIP branch: AMD per-core energy counter support.

Submitted today for the Linux kernel ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc1 release as part of the "x86/urgent" material is a fix for aging Zen 1 and Zen 2 processors where for the past year and a half they could potentially find very slow boot times.

Back in April AMD announced the Versal Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. In preparing for Versal2 evaluation kits expected around the middle of the year and production silicon by the end of 2025, AMD software engineers have begun ramping up their open-source and upstream-focused Linux driver support.

There are some new open-source/Linux details to note when it comes to the AMD accelerators in the Instinct "CDNA" land.

The I3C subsystem updates were submitted for the Linux 6.13 kernel on Monday and include support for another I3C HCI controller used on AMD systems.

Sent out last night for the ongoing Linux 6.13 merge window were all of the perf tool changes for the wonderful "perf" subsystem for performance profiling and the like. In addition to adding the HWMON PMU to "perf stat", leader sampling for inherited task events, and various other tooling improvements, there are also vendor event updates. Most notable with the updated CPU vendor events are new AMD Zen 5 processor events.

The AMDXDNA kernel driver for Linux systems that was made open-source in January for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU on laptop SoCs going back to the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series is now one step away from appearing in the mainline Linux kernel in the near future.

Going back to early in the year AMD Linux engineers began preparing support for a new Bus Lock Trap feature with Zen 5 CPUs. With the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel that support is being merged.

The in-development Linux 6.13 kernel is bringing a lot of exciting improvements for AMD Linux customers.

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel release expected today there is a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request. Notable with this last minute x86 urgent fixes for Linux 6.12 -- and also to be back-ported to prior kernel versions -- is working around an issue with AMD Ryzen Zen 4 client processors such as the Ryzen 7000/8000 series processors when making use of virtualization that could lead to the host randomly being rebooted.

AMD ZenDNN 5.0 was rolled out this morning as the newest version of this deep neural network library that is compatible with Intel's oneDNN APIs and infrastructure. ZenDNN 5.0 is now optimized for AMD Zen 5 processors such as the EPYC 9005 series. ZenDNN 5.0 also ships performance enhancements for generative large language models (LLMs) with its PyTorch plug-in.

Last month AMD Linux engineers posted patches for a 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for Linux that allows the user to communicate their cache vs. frequency preference depending upon workload and for the 3D V-Cache processors where some CCDs have the larger cache but not all. That driver is now ready for appearing in the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel.

AMD today went public with details on the "AMD Next-Gen Fortran Compiler" as a new Fortran compiler they are working on based on LLVM's Flang.

Yesterday brought the eighth and ninth iteration of the AMD XDNA Linux kernel driver posted for review for enabling the Ryzen AI branded NPUs found in their recent SoCs.

Merged today for the upcoming GCC 15 stable release is a new "X86_TUNE_AVX512_TWO_EPILOGUES" tuning optimization that is enabled by default for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list last week and now queued already via tip/tip.git's "x86/cpu" Git branch is support for a new AMD CPU feature we haven't heard about until now... ERAPS, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security.

AMD Linux engineer Borislav Petkov kicked off the new week by volleying a patch for adjusting the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO, a.k.a. "Inception") vulnerability mitigation handling for capabilities to be found with affected processors running on newer CPU microcode.

The latest patches from AMD Linux engineers for working on x86 heterogeneous design identification were queued last week for introduction in the Linux 6.13 kernel.

AMD has been teasing the Ryzen 9000X3D Zen 5 CPUs with 3D V-Cache and today they formally announced the specs of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor that will begin shipping 7 November.

Going back to earlier in the year AMD Linux engineers have been prepping the kernel for PCI Express TLP Processing Hints (TPH) support that allows for hints that can be injected to improve latency and lowering traffic congestion when there are several possible cache locations on the server with the TPH noting the optimal location of a Transaction Layer Packet (TLP). This PCIe TPH support is set to be merged upstream with the forthcoming Linux 6.13 cycle.

It turns out the latest AMD Ryzen desktop processors offer support for AMD Smart Trace Buffer (STB) that previously was only limited to mobile platforms.

Linus Torvalds took to some coding himself today to fix a user-address masking non-canonical speculation issue. The Linux kernel needed an adaptation for this "Meltdown Lite" issue due to different behavior with the latest AMD Zen 5 processors.

For the recently launched AMD EPYC 9005 series "Turin" processors there is good support out-of-the-box running on the likes of Linux 6.8 as found with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The one exception is if wanting to engage CPU power monitoring you need a RAPL/PowerCap patch that was just upstreamed in v6.12. But what about using a newer kernel for greater performance in light of all the upstream optimizations to the kernel in general? Here are some Linux 6.8 vs. 6.11 vs. 6.12 kernel benchmarks on a dual AMD EPYC 9755 server.

It was just earlier this week that AMD posted Linux patches to switch EPYC over to using the AMD P-State driver rather than the long-used generic ACPI CPUFreq driver. This should lead to better power efficiency out-of-the-box and is a change being made just for EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and future server processors. Already it's looking like this change will be introduced for the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window.

Making for an exciting Monday morning, AMD Linux engineers have kicked off the new week with a patch series introducing an exciting and long-awaited change: using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver by default for EPYC server platforms moving forward rather than the ACPI CPUFreq driver.

Merged today to Linux 6.12 Git were bug fixes to AMD's Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier (IBPB) handling that can be optionally used as part of the Retbleed and Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO) mitigations on older AMD processors.

Following last week's release of the LLVM/Clang-downstream AOCC 5.0 for optimized compiler support extended to Zen 5 CPUs, the GPU side of the house at AMD this week released AOMP 20.0-0 as their LLVM/Clang downstream focused on GPU device offloading.

Back in January AMD published an open-source XDNA Linux kernel driver for supporting their Ryzen AI NPUs. But it wasn't until July that the formal review process for the AMD XDNA driver began as the necessary prerequisite for getting picked up into the mainline Linux kernel. On Friday the fourth iteration of those patches for review were published as it hopefully is closing in on landing within the mainline kernel.

A Friday evening job posting has confirmed and reinforced details around their future AI GPU compute stack, presumably what's been referred to as the Unified AI Software Stack.

As another interesting AMD announcement this week following their Advancing AI event yesterday where they launched the EPYC 9005 series and other new hardware, they've continued with a few more soft announcements in the lead-up to the OCP Global Summit happening next week. The latest interesting tid-bit is their plans to incorporate Project Caliptra into their products beginning in 2026.

With 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" processors now launched, AMD provided a same-day release of their updated AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler "AOCC". This is AMD's downstream version of LLVM/Clang/Flang where they provide optimized AMD processor support with code that hasn't yet worked its way up into LLVM proper.

Back in August I wrote about AMD beginning work on a new Linux driver to help with heterogeneous core CPUs. On Thursday a second iteration of the AMD HFI Linux driver patches were posted with this driver continuing to work its way toward the mainline kernel.

After the AMD Advancing AI Event yesterday where they launched AMD 5th Gen EPYC processors, Instinct product updates, and new high-end networking gear, they also put out a blog post to affirm their "commitment to open security technologies in the data center."

In addition to announcing the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors and the latest on the AMD Instinct front, Lisa Su at the AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco also announced the AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU and AMD Pensando Pollara 400 Ultra Ethernet AI NIC.

AMD today quietly posted a new open-source Linux kernel driver for review... the AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver. This AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver for Linux is intended to help optimize performance on systems sporting 3D V-Cache such as the AMD Ryzen "X3D" parts and the EPYC "X" processors.