AMD engineers continue enhancing the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for supporting the Ryzen AI NPUs on Linux.

Already queued in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.2 merge window in June is support for AMD's next-gen "AIE4" NPU hardware with the AMDXDNA driver and other improvements. As part of the latest round of DRM-Misc-Next patches this week, another AMDXDNA feature is coming for Linux 7.2: expandable heap.

The AMDXDNA driver's expandable heap support is to allow avoiding the allocation of a large heap initially. With this new code, it's now possible to allocate a smaller initial heap and to then grow its size on-demand.

User-space software moving forward will now be able to trigger heap expansion on-demand as needed via the heap buffer object creation IOCTL. AMD Ryzen AI NPU firmware at least for now does not support the notion of heap shrinking but only heap expansion.

AMDXDNA expandable heap support is the main noteworthy item of the DRM-Misc-Next pull request while there are also some DRM core fixes, bug fixes for the Arm Ethos-U driver, Surface Pro 12 panel support, and other minor changes.