On 1/15/25 21:49, Mario Limonciello wrote:
On 1/15/25 00:27, Cordell Bloor wrote:Hi Mo, On 2025-01-14 19:54, M. Zhou wrote:However I'm very unfamiliar to the NPUs from the software side. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/xdna.html Is seems irrelevant to ROCm right?That is correct. The XDNA NPU is based AMD Xilinx technology and uses the Xilinx AI runtime software stack rather than the ROCm software stack. With that said, the AMD AI Max+ (aka Strix Halo) will also have a relatively powerful integrated GPU that could be used for compute (using the same software stack as other AMD GPUs).What is the software stack for NPU support?The XDNA driver and firmware has been merged to drm-misc-next for inclusion in Linux 6.14.Yup, this accurate. The firmware was merged got linux-firmware within a day or two of the driver being merged to drm-misc-next.This email prompted me to look at firmware-nonfree, and although it was updated to a version containing the NPU firmware, the NPU firmware is not yet packaged. I'll send a bug report to firmware-nonfree for this.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1093167
The xrt [1], xir [2], and vart [2] runtime libraries appear to have been packaged for Debian in 2022, but do not appear to have been actively maintained. Those source packages will need to be updated to the latest upstream version and enhanced to build the necessary binary components. I'm not expecting those package enhancements to be easy as the XDNA toolchain is fairly complex and relatively immature. I'm hoping that it turns out to be easier than it looks.In any case, I tried reaching out to Punit and Nobuhiro of the Debian Xilinx Team, but I have not heard back from them [4]. With that said, I have slowly learned that the TLD I use for my email does not have a good reputation and is often caught in spam filters. :(Cory, do you know something about the NPU support in Debian?I know a bit, but Mario Limonciello may be a better contact. He is both a Debian Maintainer and an AMD engineer working on software support for AMD AI Max+ CPUs. He's been helping with some of the planning for OS integration of NPU support.To avoid overselling myself, my time 'in Debian' is mostly in maintaining fwupd and related components upstream and then packaging them for Debian :)But yeah I have some conversations ongoing with owners for the NPU stack on some upstream changes they should make so they're viable to package for Debian.But collectively we're going to be blocked if the existing maintainers for the components that need to be upgraded aren't responsive.I'll also note that Framework Computers donated a couple of laptops to support the testing of AI libraries and applications on Debian. They have Ryzen 7040 CPUs with XDNA 1 NPUs (~10 TOPS) and are not nearly as powerful as Ryzen AI Max (~50 TOPS), but they should allow us to exercise the full AMD NPU stack from the driver to the application level. I received one of those laptops, as I wanted to use it for enabling gfx1103 support.I've not been able to contribute much to Debian on this front, as my spare time has been consumed by family commitments these past couple months. With that said, I'm sure I can test a few NPU packages as they become available.Sincerely, Cory Bloor [1]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xrt [2]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xir [3]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vart [4]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/2024/12/msg00028.html