AMD Clarifies ROCm Compute Support For GUI Applications

[oleid]

Sure, but in the meantime it doesn't work with recent cards, it's not packaged in any distro and what most end users care about is still OpenCL apps, like darktable.

Those are supported TODAY by the ROCm based OpenCL driver shipped with amdgpu-pro.
This one is packaged by AMD for at least Ubuntu and Debian, you can get it on Arch as well.

It is, however, true that ROCm should be shipped with the distributions. They say they are working on it.

[oleid]

Rocm is important for datacenter applications, but for the home market is has almost zero usability,
Clover there is what we need..

Even Nvidia is releasing OpenCL3.0 on pcie>=1.1,

Well, OpenCL3. The big question is if they support any optional features of OpenCL3. Otherwise: no news here. Just good ol' OpenCL 1.2 with a new name.

[LinAGKar]

ROCm only supports certain setups though, so even if distros start packaging it,
we'll still need Clover for open-source OpenCL, unless AMD decides to open-source PAL OpenCL.

It would be interesting to know how the packaging situation for open-source OpenCL looks across different distros. OpenSUSE has Beignet, Clover and POCL packaged, but it doesn't install any of by default, and if doesn't package Neo or ROCm. Debian and Ubuntu looks like they have Beignet, Clover, Neo and POCL available, but does it install those automatically? And Fedora looks like it has Clover and POCL, but none of the others
as far as I could tell.

[bridgman]

ROCm only supports certain setups though, so even if distros start packaging it,
we'll still need Clover for open-source OpenCL, unless AMD decides to open-source PAL OpenCL.

I'll confirm, but AFAIK we were only using PAL for OpenCL on Vega on Linux and that has now moved to ROCr. We do use PAL for Vega and newer on Windows, but Polaris and earlier parts still use legacy aka Orca code paths on both Windows and Linux.

Agree that we still need an open source OpenCL solution for Polaris and earlier, and having the same code available on newer parts as well would be even better - that was part of the reason we worked on Clover as long as we did. It's great to see Dave and others pushing it ahead.

[bridgman]

As ROCm was very GCN- and Linux-centric from the beginning, I cannot tell if it is the best solution. Intel's oneAPI seems to tackle this more elegantly.

That's the funny part - HSA and ROCm were designed as Windows-first. Even getting agreement for a separate Linux kernel driver was a tough sell internally - remember this was back in the fglrx days where the Linux kernel driver and libdrm were heavily based on Windows code, and one of the reasons fglrx still had user modesetting was that the Windows display code was written in C++.

Windows OS support for some of the HW features we needed at the time ended up being delayed so we continued on Linux. Initially that was only for technical reasons, but after we started ramping up focus on datacenter GPU running on Linux became a natural fit.

Now that we have the ROCm stack filled out we are going back and completing the Windows work.

[vegabook]

That's the funny part - HSA and ROCm were designed as Windows-first. Even getting agreement for a separate Linux kernel driver was a tough sell internally - remember this was back in the fglrx days where the Linux kernel driver and libdrm were heavily based on Windows code, and one of the reasons fglrx still had user modesetting was that the Windows display code was written in C++.

Windows OS support for some of the HW features we needed at the time ended up being delayed so we continued on Linux. Initially that was only for technical reasons, but after we started ramping up focus on datacenter GPU running on Linux became a natural fit.

Now that we have the ROCm stack filled out we are going back and restarting the Windows work.

So, right now, today, what is the canonical solution for having at least OpenCL (not necessarily the whole ROCm stack), support for a GCN/Vega card, on either Fedora 33, or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (both Kernel 5.8)?

I've heard "you can just install the userspace packages" but that hasn't worked for me. Is there a place I can go, and for these most common of distros, get instructions for it to work? Or do I have to install a different kernel first?

[ms178]

That's the funny part - HSA and ROCm were designed as Windows-first. Even getting agreement for a separate Linux kernel driver was a tough sell internally - remember this was back in the fglrx days where the Linux kernel driver and libdrm were heavily based on Windows code, and one of the reasons fglrx still had user modesetting was that the Windows display code was written in C++.

Windows OS support for some of the HW features we needed at the time ended up being delayed so we continued on Linux. Initially that was only for technical reasons, but after we started ramping up focus on datacenter GPU running on Linux became a natural fit.

Now that we have the ROCm stack filled out we are going back and completing the Windows work.

Thanks for your insights, I just remember the part about missing features on Windows which were already available on Linux that made me think that Linux was the top priority back then (also due to HPC-work and the desire to compete with Nvidia in data centers). I hope your teams have a path forward for us consumers to enjoy the fruits of all that hard work, too. It seems to be a huge construction site for all these years with slight similarities to the BER (Berlin airport which took a little longer to finish as anticipated).

[oleid]

So, right now, today, what is the canonical solution for having at least OpenCL (not necessarily the whole ROCm stack), support for a GCN/Vega card, on either Fedora 33, or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (both Kernel 5.8)?

I've heard "you can just install the userspace packages" but that hasn't worked for me. Is there a place I can go, and for these most common of distros, get instructions for it to work? Or do I have to install a different kernel first?

https://math.dartmouth.edu/~sarunas/amdgpu.html

On ArchLinux install opencl-amd from AUR.

[hubick]

Hey AMD, please know that the reason I spent $$$ on a Radeon Pro VII was for OpenCL acceleration with PTGUI on Linux.

[tildearrow]

ROCm only supports certain setups though, so even if distros start packaging it,
we'll still need Clover for open-source OpenCL, unless AMD decides to open-source PAL OpenCL.

It would be interesting to know how the packaging situation for open-source OpenCL looks across different distros. OpenSUSE has Beignet, Clover and POCL packaged, but it doesn't install any of by default, and if doesn't package Neo or ROCm. Debian and Ubuntu looks like they have Beignet, Clover, Neo and POCL available, but does it install those automatically? And Fedora looks like it has Clover and POCL, but none of the others
as far as I could tell.

If only ACO OpenCL was a thing...