René Rebe Patches the Linux Kernel for "World's First" Look at a Radeon RX 6700XT on a RISC-V PC
Owners of SiFive's first ITX-format RISC-V PC board may soon be able to add a high-performance GPU to the mix, using the AMDGPU driver.
Computer scientist René Rebe has patched the Linux kernel to bring support for AMD's RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6700XT graphics card to RISC-V systems — starting with the HiFive Unmatched board.
"[It] took only 10 hours to debug and proof-of-concept patch the Linux kernel to support [the] additional requirements of AMDGPU for RISCV64 to use the newly arrived RX 6700XT Navy Flounder [graphics card]," Rebe explains of his work, "w[ith] additional VAAPI hardware accelerated video encoding on the HiFive SiFive Unmatched board!"
Rebe's work brings a high-performance graphics card option to those working with the HiFive Unmatched, a development board designed for those working on projects using desktop- and server-class implementations of the RISC-V instruction set. In theory, the work is also backwards-compatible with the older HiFive Unleashed — providing you add the required expansion board for PCI Express connectivity.
In a livestream video, reproduced above, Rebe showed off what he described as a "world's first:" Hardware-accelerated rendering and video encoding on the Radeon RX 6700XT graphics card, codenamed Navy Flounder, on a 64-bit RISC-V platform — though the 3D performance appeared to be limited somewhat by the CPU.
The full video and associated chat recording is available on the Bits Inside by René Rebe YouTube channel.