Installation of AI driver for AMD AI9
NPU Driver for GNU/Linux

If you have acquired our new line of devices with AI9 cpu, you'd be interested in getting all the performance of the NPU.
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to install the driver for AI9 so your OS is able to use the NPU, this tutorial will cover OS' derivated in Ubuntu and using the 6.14 kernel:

Driver download

Create a temporal folder to download the driver, then in that folder:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/amd/xdna-driver
$ cd xdna-driver

Driver installation

Install the necessary dependencies to install the driver

cd tools
sudo ./amdxdna_deps.sh
cd ..

Now create the packages to install the XRT plugin to use the NPU:

cd xrt/build
./build.sh -npu -opt
sudo apt-get install ./Release/xrt_*-amd64-base.deb
cd ../../build
./build.sh -release
sudo apt-get install ./Release/xrt_plugin.*-amdxdna.deb
cd ..

Tests and usage

To use the NPU after install, you need to activate it first: 

source /opt/xilinx/xrt/setup.sh

And the XRT plugin to use the NPU should be enabled, building and running the tests for the NPU is recommended:

xrt-smi validate

While the tests are running, the NPU usage can be seen in tools such as amdgpu_top , this tool measures the usage of the AMD GPU driver, including the NPU 


# Evo
Installation of AI driver for AMD AI9
Samanta Sanchez Slimbook
1 September, 2025
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