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⇱ RISC-V With Linux 6.15 Adds Support For BFloat16 "BF16" Instructions - Phoronix


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RISC-V With Linux 6.15 Adds Support For BFloat16 "BF16" Instructions

Written by Michael Larabel in RISC-V on 5 April 2025 at 10:00 AM EDT. 5 Comments
Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release.

RISC-V with Linux 6.15 brings build improvements thanks to a re-architecting of the Kconfig build system options around RISC-V for selecting sub-architecture features.

For the Linux 6.15 kernel with RISC-V there is also support for building relocatable non-MMU kernels, support for huge PFNMAPS to improve TLB utilization, support for runtime constants, new RISC-V instructions supported, and a variety of fixes.

👁 RISC-V BF16 instructions


RISC-V in this next Linux kernel version adds support for a number of newer instructions including bfloat16, Zicbom, Zaamo, Zalrsc, Zicntr, and Zihpm. Yes, RISC-V is finally ready to go with its BFloat16 precision floating-point ISA support. The BF16 extensions were ratified for the RISC-V spec and now prepped for the necessary Linux kernel bits.

The full list of RISC-V architecture changes for the Linux 6.15 merge window can be found via this pull.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.