While the AMD Ryzen AI 400 series "Gorgon Halo" systems are nearing the marketplace, the NPU support for Linux was seemingly overlooked until now. But at least the simple enablement patch looks like it will arrive for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel.

A patch was posted yesterday to the Linux kernel mailing list for enabling the AIE2 Revision 9 NPU within the AMDXDNA accelerator driver. The two line patch confirms that this AIE2 revision 9 hardware is the Gorgon Halo "GRGH" NPU.

It's just adding the "GRGH" revision for Gorgon Halo and adding it to the device table list. No other changes are needed to the AMDXDNA driver with this being a straight-forward addition with the NPU being effectively the same as what's found with Strix Point, Strix Halo, and Gorgon Point. It's just a bit surprising that this patch is only surfacing now given the imminent availability on Ryzen AI Max 400 series, but presumably was just overlooked with the Ryzen AI NPU support on Linux still not being as mature and widely-used as with Windows software. In any event, with Strix Halo and now Gorgon Halo sure to be popular for Linux use due to AI/LLMs, this NPU should have been supported already for ensuring a great at-launch experience.

In any case the patch is out there now and is already applied to drm-misc-next so it should make it for the Linux 7.4 merge window. As it's a very straight-forward addition, it's possible it will also be back-ported in due time to current stable series.

The rest of Gorgon Halo Linux support appears to be in order and hopefully we'll find our hands on AMD Ryzen AI Max 400 series hardware for Linux support testing and performance benchmarking.