Devlog 01: Talking to the Silicon (DRM & Phoenix Discovery)

So the plan is simple: get GGUF models running straight on the Ryzen AI NPU without touching bloated ONNX or Vitis runtimes.

First step was checking if we could even talk to /dev/accel/accel0 directly without root. Wrote a quick probe calling the kernel’s amdxdna DRM driver ioctls:

struct amdxdna_drm_get_info info{};
info.param = DRM_AMDXDNA_GET_INFO_TOPOLOGY;
ioctl(fd, DRM_IOCTL_AMDXDNA_GET_INFO, &info);

• DRM_IOCTL_AMDXDNA_GET_INFO: Queries the hardware directly from the kernel.
• info.param = TOPOLOGY: Confirmed our Phoenix chip has 4 columns × 4 compute rows = 16 AIE2 tiles.

Instead of dragging in a 10 GB SDK, we wrote our own include/xdna/amdxdna_uapi.h directly matching the kernel driver structs. Zero bloat, instant builds.