RISC-V gets support for AMD's latest Radeon RX 7000 GPUs

RISC-V is now mostly on par with the x86 and Arm processor instruction set architectures, at least on the CPU side of things. Native RISC-V GPUs might still take a while to catch up even with the big adoption push initiated by SiFive a few years ago. However, RISC-V CPUs already support the older x86-based GCN GPUs from AMD, and they can also be tweaked to work with newer Navi GPUs, as demonstrated two years ago by a Linux expert. That attempt made use of a Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU and it necessitated quite a bit of troubleshooting since the Navi architecture utilizes a different display code to initialize on Linux. This problem should soon be fixed, as SiFive intends to make Navi GPUs compatible with its RISC-V platforms out of the box via driver support expected to be released on the Linux 6.8 kernel update.

Two days ago, Samuel Holland from SiFive posted new driver patches that add Navi support for RISC-V processors. Driver description mentions that the drivers enables Navi compatibility for RISC-V motherboards such as the SiFive HiFive Unmatched designed for desktop PCs. Additionally, the drivers add CONFIG_DRM_AMD_DC_FP initialization code to enable kernel-mode FPU support.

These patches are now under review and if all checks out, they should be added to the Linux 6.8 kernel. While adding modern GPU support is an important step for the adoption of the RISC-V platform, we might still be at least a few years away from seeing triple A games and content creation tools running smoothly on SiFive’s systems.

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