ROCm 3.7 Has Open-Source OpenCL Image Module Included

With last week's release of ROCm 3.7 for the Radeon Open eCosystem stack, it turns out there is a welcome change that wasn't published as part of the announcement.

Radeon Open eCosystem 3.7 has an open-source OpenCL Image implementation. With previous releases, a binary-only libhsa-ext-image64.so library was required for OpenCL Image support with the ROCm stack. But quietly with the new ROCm 3.7 release, they added the source code as part of the ROCR run-time.

OpenCL Image support is generally needed by imaging applications with the likes of Darktable and DaVinci Resolve, both of which seem to be happily playing fine now according to user reports with ROCm 3.7. This change in the OpenCL Image support was spotted on pixls.us.

The updated documentation within ROCm 3.7 notes the new image support module but it also can impose new build requirements if they are not already found on your system:

As of ROCm release 3.7 the runtime includes an optional image support module (previously hsa-ext-rocr-dev). By default this module is included in builds of the runtime. The image module may be excluded the runtime by setting cmake variable IMAGE_SUPPORT to OFF.

When building the optional image module additional build dependencies are required. An amdgcn compatible clang and device library must be installed to build the image module. The latest version of these requirements can be obtained from the ROCm package repository (see: https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/Installation_Guide/Installation-Guide.html) The latest source for these projects may be found here:

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/llvm-project

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm-Device-Libs

Additionally xxd must be installed.

The ROCm 3.7 release can be downloaded via GitHub.