AMD-Powered Barco MXRT Graphics Cards Finally Seeing Linux Driver Support

Barco, the Europeean technology company that manufactures the AMD GPU based MXRT graphics cards for for multi-display medical imaging systems (and also MXRV for their NVIDIA based graphics cards), have to date only seen Windows drivers published for their professional-grade graphics cards even with using Radeon Pro derived GPUs. But a patch published today to the AMD graphics mailing list is opening the door for Linux support.

Matthew Jacob of Feral Software posted the patch for enabling several Barco MXRT graphics cards to work with the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver. The patch is quite simple and confirms that just new device IDs are added on top of the existing AMD Radeon Linux driver code paths.

"These adapters typically are only supported by Barco on the Windows platform. However, with these changes in the linux driver, multiple monitor support should work correctly."

The patch adds support for the Barco MXRT-5600 as a Bonaire-based graphics card and the Barco MXRT-7600 as a Tonga-based GPU. Plus it lists two Polaris graphics cards too as what's noted to be a "tentative" Barco MXRT-8750 and "tentative" Barco MXRT-4700. The Barco MXRT-4700 does already exist though searching around the Barco MXRT-8750 is currently an unreleased model.

So with this patch adding the Barco device IDs to the AMDGPU driver, it appears good enough to get these graphics cards working under Linux.