AMD says XDNA1 Linux LLM support isn't available. I used AI-assisted development to get a full transformer layer running on a Ryzen 7 8845HS NPU.

I've been experimenting with the NPU in my Ryzen 7 8845HS laptop (Hawk Point / XDNA1) on Fedora Linux.

A lot of the current AMD Ryzen AI documentation focuses on XDNA2 hardware, and community projects like FastFlowLM don't currently support XDNA1. I was curious whether the hardware was actually incapable of running LLM workloads on Linux, or if the software support had simply moved on.

Full disclosure: I used ChatGPT and Codex heavily throughout this project. I am not an AI compiler engineer and I couldn't have done this without AI-assisted code investigation, debugging and porting work.

The rough progression was:

* Verified the NPU was working through `amdxdna`
* Investigated older RyzenAI-SW releases
* Found public Phoenix/XDNA1 artifacts (`1x4.xclbin`, qlinear\_2, transaction binaries)
* Built the modern Linux XRT/XDNA userspace stack
* Got AMD's old Phoenix GEMM transactions executing on Linux
* Validated 24 transformer-relevant GEMM shapes
* Validated real quantized int4/BF16 inference paths
* Built a reusable Linux `XDNA1QLinear` wrapper
* Executed a complete synthetic Llama-2-style transformer layer

Current status:

* Quantized int4 weights
* BF16 activations
* Q/K/V/O projections on the NPU
* MLP projections on the NPU
* RMSNorm, RoPE, attention and activation functions on CPU
* Deterministic repeatable results
* No Windows involved

Some interesting numbers:

* \~6 ms per transformer layer (warm)
* \~116 MiB resident memory per layer
* 8-layer test stack completed successfully
* Memory scaling appears linear
* No kernel/XRT leaks observed so far

What I have not done:

* No real model weights yet
* No llama.cpp integration
* No token generation
* No end-to-end LLM inference

At this point it looks less like a hardware limitation and more like an engineering project. The old XDNA1 path appears to still be functional under Linux when paired with the modern amdxdna stack.

I'm mostly posting because I couldn't find many examples of people doing anything substantial with XDNA1 NPUs on Linux, and I thought others might find it interesting.

If there's interest, I'm happy to clean up the code and publish the project on GitHub.

https://redd.it/1u2tld0
@r_linux