As part of our various "year end" articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news and hardware reviews of 2025.

This year was another exciting year for AMD on Linux from their continued – and increasing – Linux kernel contributions to numerous optimizations from CPUs to their graphics drivers. The ROCm compute stack also deserves a standout mention for becoming much more fit this year and on a much more solid footing now for competing with the NVIDIA CUDA software stack moving forward. AMD also got out their initial Zen 6 compiler support for GCC this year and other early hardware enablement has begun for next year’s Zen 6 client and server processors. On the hardware side, Strix Halo would likely be my favorite AMD hardware of 2025. I continue to be quite impressed with Strix Halo and its terrific CPU and GPU performance.

Out of 414 AMD Linux/open-source related news articles in 2025 on Phoronix, here is a look back at the most popular AMD news of the year:

AMD Publishes Open-Source GIM Driver For GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In The Roadmap" AMD has published as open-source their "GPU-IOV Module" used for virtualization with Instinct accelerators. It’s also reported on their roadmap for bringing virtualization support to their client (Radeon) discrete GPUs.

Radeon Software For Linux Dropping AMD’s Proprietary OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers With how well the open-source and upstream AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack is these days between the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa, the Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver releases are not usually notable these days on Phoronix... The packaged Radeon Software for Linux drivers haven’t been popular with gamers/enthusiasts in years given how good the upstream support is and those packaged bits mostly useful for those just running enterprise Linux distributions with older versions of Linux and Mesa. But the next Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release is set to introduce a big change.

AMD Announces "Instella" Fully Open-Source 3B Language Models Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models.

AMD Officially Confirms The End Of The AMDVLK Driver To no real surprise given the happenings (or there the lack of) the past few months, AMD formally announced publicly today that their open-source AMDVLK driver has been discontinued in favor of the Mesa RADV driver for Vulkan needs on Linux.

AMD ROCm 7.0 Officially Released With Many Significant Improvements Overnight the AMD ROCm 7.0 release tags began appearing within the public Git repositories. Now AMD ROCm 7.0 is officially released as a very significant step forward for AMD’s open-source GPU compute stack for better competing against NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem.

Steam On Linux Ends 2024 With A Nice Boost To Its Marketshare, AMD Linux CPU Use At 74% Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2024 and they reflect a nice upward trend for the Linux gaming statistics and a high point in recent times.

Valve Linux Engineer Working On A Big Improvement For Old AMD Radeon GPUs Timur Kristóf as a contractor on Valve’s open-source Linux graphics driver team is known for his work on the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler but recently he’s been working on some improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver. A big feat he’s been tackling is enabling support for analog display connectors within the AMDGPU driver for the "DC" code. Besides a few supported older GPUs having DVI-I connections, this analog support is significant in that it’s a milestone for unblocking the aging GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs from using the modern AMDGPU driver by default.

Blender 4.4 Released With Vulkan Improvements & AMD HIP RT No Longer Experimental Blender 4.4 is out today as the newest version of this incredible, open-source 3D modeling software.

AMDGPU VirtIO Native Context Merged: Native AMD Driver Support Within Guest VMs An exciting change was just merged into Mesa 25.0 that has been about two years in the making... AMDGPU native context support for VirtIO to allow for using native OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers within guest virtual machines for better performance.

Linux 6.15 Fix Merged For Sizable Performance Regression On Newer AMD CPUs At the end of April I reported on a significant performance regression affecting newer AMD CPUs and was bisected to a change in the AMD SRSO mitigation handling for Zen 4/5 processors with the Linux 6.15 kernel. The fix for that significant performance regression was merged today ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15-rc6 release.

ollama Rolls Out Experimental Vulkan Support For Expanded AMD & Intel GPU Coverage The ollama 0.12.6-rc0 software released this evening and with it comes experimental Vulkan API support.

Updated Linux Patch Would Disable RDSEED For All AMD Zen 5 CPUs A few days back we reported on a Meta engineer uncovering an architectural issue with RDSEED usage on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs. It ended up being found to affect more CPU models than originally anticipated and a new patch posted to the Linux kernel mailing list would disable RDSEED usage across all AMD Zen 5 processors.

Latest AVX-512 Optimization For FFmpeg Shows Wild Improvement On AMD Ryzen Merged today for the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was yet another AVX-512 optimized code path... Compared to the pure C code, the AVX2 code path was 10.98x faster while this new AVX-512 code path clocks in at 18x the performance of the common C code.

Gzip 1.14 Released With Faster Decompression On Intel & AMD CPUs Gzip 1.14 released earlier today as the first new release to this widely-used file compression format on Linux systems and other platforms.

Linux 6.13 Released With AutoFDO + Propeller, AMD Changes & Broader Apple Support As anticipated the Linux 6.13 kernel was promoted to stable today with an on-time release and in turn also marking the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window. Linux 6.13 stable has plenty of fine features for this first major kernel release of 2025.

Linux’s New "Sheaves" Per-CPU Caching Layer Showing Massive Wins For AMD Performance Earlier this week I wrote about Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer likely coming for Linux 6.18. The sheaves patches have been queued into the "slab/for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel merge window. Patches posted now by Google are showing the Linux Sheaves code having a massive beneficial impact for large AMD systems.

AMD Announces The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" For Advanced Linux Desktop Features An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers... The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities.

AMD Acknowledges RDSEED Failure On AMD Zen 5 With Software Fix Coming In mid-October a Meta engineer uncovered an RDSEED architectural issue with AMD Zen 5 CPUs. A patch in turn was sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list to disable RDSEED usage on affected Zen 5 processors. AMD this week issued a security bulletin to acknowledge the issue and report that a microcode fix is coming.

Linux 6.16 Ready With Fixes For Old AMD Hardware "Which Wasn’t Even Supposed To Run Linux" Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel release due out later today, an x86/urgent pull request was sent out today that includes some fixes for old AMD Zen 2 hardware.

Linux 6.14 Released With Working NTSYNC Driver, AMD Ryzen AI Accelerator Support There was a hiccup yesterday with no Linux 6.14 release or 6.14-rc8 otherwise... Linus Torvalds has a very good track record of sticking to his Sunday release regiment. Yet yesterday was quiet. Today though Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14 kernel as the newest stable version. Linux 6.14 is what’s set to go on and power Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, and other spring 2025 Linux distribution releases.

And the most popular AMD Linux hardware reviews/benchmarks of 2025:

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel June 2024 marked the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite to much initial fanfare for finally some compelling ARM laptop designs. While initially – and still to this day with the likes of the TUXEDO X Elite laptop not materializing yet – being focused on Windows 11 on ARM, there was hope among Linux users this would lead to a nice ARM Linux laptop experience, since after all Qualcomm and Linaro were working on enhancing the support for Linux. Now approaching the one year point, the overall state of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite support and performance is rather disappointing. Here’s a look at where things currently are and performance relative to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra when making use of the latest Ubuntu Linux support.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 + RX 9070 XT Linux Performance Last week AMD formally announced the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards that will begin shipping tomorrow at $549 for the Radeon RX 9070 and $599 for the RX 9070 XT. Today the review embargo is lifted so we can now share Linux performance benchmarks and more details on the open-source Linux driver support for these first AMD RDNA4 graphics cards.

AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 vs. Ryzen 9 9950X vs. Ryzen 9 9950X3D Linux Performance In today’s launch-day review of the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" were a number of benchmarks comparing the mini/SFF PC to Framework Laptops, the Strix Halo powered HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptops, and similar devices. With this being a desktop after all, for those wondering how the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 compares in a desktop form factor to the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X series processors, this article has all those benchmark numbers.

AMD Ryzen 9000 vs. Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake On Linux For Q1-2025 In ~400 Benchmarks For those wondering how the latest AMD Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" series and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Arrow Lake" desktop processors are battling it out on Linux, here are some fresh benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with the latest software updates as well as the newest system BIOS updates for a fresh, all-new look at these Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs on Linux.

AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 Linux Benchmarks: Outright Incredible Performance We finally have AMD’s Strix Halo in the lab for benchmarking! HP has kindly sent over their ZBook Ultra 14-inch G1a mobile workstation: it’s a beast being powered by the top-end AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 SoC with 16 cores / 32 threads and powerful integrated Radeon 8060S graphics, 128GB of system memory, a nice 14-inch 2.8K display, and other top-end features to provide a dominating laptop powerhouse. In today’s article are the very initial benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 Strix Halo SoC under Linux with a focus on the CPU capabilities: a separate article also out today is looking at the AMD Radeon 8060S graphics on Linux.

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D Delivers Excellent Performance For Linux Developers, Creators & Technical Computing Ahead of tomorrow’s availability of the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPUs in retail channels, today the embargo lifts on being able to deliver Ryzen 9 9950X3D reviews and performance benchmarks. Simply put, for Linux creators, developers, enthusiasts, and others running technical computing workloads and other similar tasks on their desktop, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D with its 16 cores / 32 threads and 144MB total cache makes for an excellent desktop CPU. In this review are around 400 Linux benchmarks looking at the captivating performance and competitive power efficiency of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

Framework 13 With AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series "Strix Point" Makes For A Great Linux Laptop Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs: wow, what an upgrade! I’ve spent the past week testing out the Framework 13 with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and it’s been terrific. Framework 13’s modularity continues to pay off and allows easily upgrading to the new Strix Point bearing motherboard with AMD Zen 5 CPU cores and the Radeon 890M (RDNA 3.5) integrated graphics. If you are on a fresh Linux distribution the support is in great shape and paired with great performance for delivering a great 2025 Linux laptop option.

AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 With Framework Desktop vs. Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Linux Performance Last week alongside our Framework Desktop review with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" SoC I posted benchmarks of the Strix Halo performance compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X / 9950X3D socketed desktop processors. For those wondering similarly how the top-end Strix Halo SoC in the Framework Desktop competes with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" flagship in performance and power efficiency, here are those comparison benchmarks.

First Benchmarks Of Windows 11 25H2 vs. Ubuntu 25.10 On AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Microsoft is preparing to ship Windows 11 25H2 as their newest incremental update to their operating system. Windows 11 25H2 is currently available via their preview channel in advance of the formal public release in October. With Canonical also putting the finishing touches on their Ubuntu 25.10 release also due for a stable release in October, here are some benchmarks looking at how those competing operating systems are fairing in various CPU benchmarks on the same hardware.

AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" Delivers Best Performance On Linux Over Windows 11 - Even With Gaming Now having shown the very strong AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 Linux performance for this "Strix Halo" SoC with Radeon 8060S iGPU for its integrated graphics, you may be wondering on the same hardware how this compares to Microsoft Windows 11. Today’s article is looking at the Microsoft Windows 11 Pro performance as shipped by HP on their ZBook Ultra 14 G1a laptop compared to Ubuntu 25.04 with a clean install.

What do you hope to see out of AMD on Linux in 2026? Let us know in the forums.