Linux 7.1 adds Ryzen AI NPU monitoring

AMD hardware has generally enjoyed better support on Linux than Intel and NVIDIA alternatives, although adoption and feature parity with Windows can sometimes arrive more slowly. That has been the case with AMD APUs, which are only now set to gain power and usage monitoring through a pull request for Linux 7.1.

The new AMDXDNA driver will expose power monitoring metrics for AMD Ryzen Artificial Intelligence NPUs via DRM_IOCTL_AMDXDNA_GET_INFO, alongside new metrics that expose real-time NPU busy metrics to applications. These additions are expected to give developers and users better visibility into how the hardware is being used during local LLM workloads and other Artificial Intelligence processing.

Both of these new metrics are positioned to help gauge hardware utilization and improve scheduling for Artificial Intelligence tasks. These changes are expected to land in Linux 7.1, slated to release after 7.0, which is currently in development and is expected to launch sometime between April and May. Linux 7.0 itself is expected to introduce some significant performance improvements when it comes to cache and memory handling.