AMD Says They'll Be Open-Sourcing More Of Their GPU Software Stack & Hardware Docs

AMD Radeon posted to Twitter/X that "coming soon" they will be open-sourcing additional portions of their software stack as well as putting out more hardware documentation.

The @amdradeon account posted:

"As community interest grows in ROCm on Radeon, we've created a tracker to capture feedback and provide updates.

Coming soon: Open sourcing additional portions of our software stack and more hardware documentation."

It's interesting form the software side that they will be working to make additional portions of their Radeon software stack open-source. Their GPU and ROCm software stacks are rather open as it is now, while the main exception is around the GPU firmware/microcode. There has been the recent calls to make at least some AMD GPU firmware open-source, so we'll see in time if this open-sourcing is about that or something else in their software stack.

It's also interesting they plan to publish more hardware documentation. Aside from ISA documentation, the Radeon hardware documentation hasn't been nearly as much as it was a decade ago or more... AMD used to put out a lot of programming docs back during the early days of their open-source effort but then focused instead on investing the engineering/legal resources on getting their open-source Linux graphics driver code instead. Sanitizing and clearing legal review of their hardware documentation to make it open-source was a significant time commitment and all the resources involved that instead they were focusing more on ensuring their open-source Linux driver is in good shape. We'll see what all the "more hardware documentation" will entail.

It's also a bit odd that in regards to the tracker for capturing feedback/updates around ROCm on Radeon they linked to nod-ai/fuzzyHSA on GitHub. This appears to be on a fuzzing library from Nod.ai, which AMD acquired Nod.ai last year. With there already being ROCm GitHub repositories and the like, why they are using fuzzyHSA's repository as an issue tracker seems rather odd unless it's some sort of linking mistake.

In any event, I'm certainly excited to see more open-source and hardware documentation, let's see what it is...