Unlock AMD GPU Power on Raspberry Pi: No Linux Recompilation Needed!
For years, the holy grail of ARM-based SBC tinkering has been true hardware acceleration via discrete GPUs. Historically, this meant hours of cross-compiling custom kernels, patching Device Trees, and praying to the silicon gods that your kernel panics were legible. With the advent of the Raspberry Pi 5 and the exposed PCIe bus on the CM4, the landscape has changed. This guide targets the AMD GPU Raspberry Pi integration without the nightmare of kernel recompilation. We will leverage mainline kernel support found in specific ARM64 distributions, manipulate PCIe lane configurations via config overlays, and tackle the notorious BAR (Base Address Register) space issues that plague ARM architectures. The "No Recompile" Strategy: Choosing the Right Distro The primary reason users traditionally recompiled kernels was that the stock Raspberry Pi OS kernel stripped out unused modules (like amdgpu ) to save space. To bypass this without building from sou...