Michel Dänzer, a graphics driver engineer working for AMD, has had the great pleasure of announcing the initial release and immediate availability for download of the xf86-video-amdgpu 1.0.0 driver.

The announcement has been made on the X.Org Announce mailing list of the X.Org Foundation, and according to Mr. Dänzer, the brand new xf86-video-amdgpu 1.0.0 driver has been forked from the open-source xf86-video-ati AMD Radeon graphics driver to support the AMDGPU kernel driver introduced in Linux kernel 4.2.

"This is the initial release of the xf86-video-amdgpu driver," says Michel Dänzer. "It was forked from the xf86-video-ati radeon driver and modified to support the amdgpu kernel driver via libdrm_amdgpu, and by extension the latest AMD GPU families Tonga, Carrizo, Iceland, Fiji and Stoney."

If you've been reading the news lately, you probably already know that the open-source xf86-video-amdgpu driver has been in the works for quite some time now, but this is the announcement for the xf86-video-amdgpu 1.0.0 release, the first mature, production-ready version of the driver.

Some functionality has been removed

It looks like AMD decided to remove some of the features in this first stable release of the xf86-video-amdgpu driver because it appears not to be relevant for the AMD GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) supported by the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver, which should not affect the overall functionality of the driver.

xf86-video-amdgpu 1.0.0 currently supports AMD GPUs from the Fiji, Carrizo, Tonga, Stoney, and Iceland families. Those interested in using this driver on their GNU/Linux operating systems should search it in the default software repositories of the respective distribution.

Alternatively, you can download the xf86-video-amdgpu 1.0.0 sources and start compiling the driver by hand. Detailed installation instructions for all Linux kernel-based distributions can be found in the source archive, along with the full changelog for this initial release of the driver.