Building the shim without the kernel driver

[om26er]

i dont want to build the kernel driver. i only need to build the shim library so that xrt could work with AMD NPU.

How do i do that?

[maxzhen]

We need to add some new options to support this. Will look into it soon.

[om26er]

@maxzhen do we know if the xrt shim is supposed to work with amdxdna driver in the linux kernel (linux-next right now) or is that going to need some changes in the shim code as well ?

[maxzhen]

It should just work. @houlz0507 can confirm.

[houlz0507]

Yes. It works fine. And the upstream driver is a little behind. E.g. import/export BO is not supported yet in upstream driver.

[lamikr]

I have patched the upstream driver version to 6.13.rc5 and used that version on Fedora 40 with the xrt runtime and xrt-plugin driver available by this repo. At least the example_noop_test is able to detect the npu and test passes.

For firmwares I used the versions available in this xdna-driver repo. Btw, does anybody know how to get the files from /lib/firmware/amdnpu folder to be added automatically to kernel's initrd image on Fedora? When ever I do the "make install" for kernel, amdnpu firmwares does not get into initrd. To get amdnpu firmware files to initrd so that amdxdna driver will find them, I need now run this dracut command always after kernel install.

dracut -f -i /lib/firmware /lib/firmware

Maybe I am missing some dracut conf file I should edit...

[houlz0507]

The firmwares are upstreamed. Maybe you can try clone https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/. Then build firmware package and install it.