As outlined yesterday the Radeon RX 7900 series can work on the upstream, open-source Linux driver stack if using Linux 6.0+ and Mesa 22.2 (but ideally 22.3+). But if you aren't wanting to jump to a newer kernel version and are running one of the supported enterprise Linux distributions, today AMD released their Radeon Software for Linux 22.40 driver package with Radeon RX 7000 "RDNA3" series support.

Today's Radeon Software for Linux 22.40 driver update provides a packaged driver solution for Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 / 8.7 / 7.9, and SUSE Linux Enterprise SLED/SLES 15 SP4. If you are one of those supported enterprise Linux releases, the packaged driver with its "open" and "pro" driver options makes it easy to setup the kernel driver and various user-space driver options now with RDNA3 graphics support.

In addition to adding support for the Radeon RX 7900 series graphics processors, the only other listed change with this v22.40 driver release is now supporting RHEL 8.7 and RHEL 9.1 as the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux point releases. This Linux packaged driver continues to support back to GCN 1.2 R9 200/300 era graphics cards.

Those interested can find this launch day packaged Radeon RX 7900 XT / Radeon RX 7900 XTX Linux driver on AMD.com . But if you are comfortable using Mesa Git (or 23.3) and a kernel of Linux 6.0 or later, you can just as well be using the upstream open-source kernel graphics driver stack with the new RDNA3 graphics cards that are available for purchase today. I'll be having more Radeon RX 7900 series Linux benchmarks shortly on Phoronix. If you missed it yesterday see my Radeon RX 7900 XT / RX 7900 XTX launch day review .