today 26.05.2025
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Installing AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT firmware and drivers on Gentoo Linux

Since I had a fairly old GPU (an AMD Radeon RX 570 to be specific), I waited for the release of the Radeon RX 9000 series to finally upgrade. I was amazed how smooth the shift went. To be fair, I waited a several weeks after the initial release to make sure that people will make the necessary firmware and drivers available on Gentoo Linux.

How do you install your Radeon RX 9070 (XT) on Gentoo?

Prerequisites

If your old GPU wasn’t produced by “Team Red” (AMD), you must set the VIDEO_CARDS variable to amdgpu radeonsi.

Install the necessary firmware

Either you install the entire sys-kernel/linux-firmware package (which includes the necessary firmware, and more), or set the savedconfig flag for the package and specify the firmware you want to install. See the Gentoo Wiki for more information on how to do so.

If you go for the second option, add the following lines to the firmware config file (below the line # Remove files that shall not be installed from this list.):

amdgpu/gc_12_0_1_imu.bin

amdgpu/gc_12_0_1_me.bin

amdgpu/gc_12_0_1_mec.bin

amdgpu/gc_12_0_1_pfp.bin

amdgpu/gc_12_0_1_rlc.bin

amdgpu/gc_12_0_1_uni_mes.bin

amdgpu/dcn_4_0_1_dmcub.bin

amdgpu/psp_14_0_3_sos.bin

amdgpu/psp_14_0_3_ta.bin

amdgpu/sdma_7_0_1.bin

amdgpu/smu_14_0_3.bin

amdgpu/vcn_5_0_0.bin

And then rebuild linux-firmware.

This is it for the firmware. We can now continue with the kernel.

Install Linux kernel 6.12 or newer

While kernel 6.12. should be sufficient, some people still experience bugs with this kernel version. It is recommended to use a newer version. You can do yo be adding the ~amd64 keyword to the necessary config files (only necessary if the desired kernel version is still marked as testing). For instance, you can add the following lines to your config file(s) to use Kernel 6.14.5 (given you use gentoo-kernel):

=sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-6.14.5 ~amd64

=sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-6.14.5 ~amd64

=virtual/dist-kernel-6.14.5 ~amd64

Then rebuild your kernel:

sudo emerge -a1 sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel

That’s all for the kernel.

Install Mesa 25

While Mesa 24 technically worked for me, I had weird artifacts around my mouse cursor. Updating to Mesa 25 fixed the problem. If the desired version is marked as testing (which was the case when I wrote this blog post), add the following line to the appropriate config file:

=media-libs/mesa-25.0.5 ~amd64

Rebuild Mesa:

sudo emerge -a1 media-libs/mesa

Since I don’t use Linux for gaming, I stopped here and everything works well. If that is not the case for you, you propably want to install the official (proprietary) AMD drivers for your card. You can download them from their website.

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