AMD ROCm 1.9 Available With Vega 20 Support Plus Upstream Kernel Compatibility

For months we have been looking forward to ROCm 1.9 as the latest feature update to the Radeon Open eCosystem stack while on Friday that big release finally took place. This ROCm update for GPU compute purposes has a lot of new features.

Initially we were looking forward to ROCm 1.9 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS support, which ended up being back-ported to the 1.8 series. But other headlining features of ROCm 1.9 include Vega 20 "Vega 7nm" support, a ROCm System Management Interface (ROCm SMI) library, HIP/HPCC improvements, rocprof for ROCm profling, compatibility with the upstream AMDKFD support now found in the mainline Linux kernel (Linux 4.17+), and various other improvements.

Overall, it's a hell of an update with compatibility for the latest upstream Linux kernel releases (a.k.a. easier deployment across distributions and no worrying about DKMS module messes), the ROCm SMI support, Vega 20 support is ready ahead of launch, and more.

Instructions on setting up ROCm 1.9 can be found via GitHub. I'll be having some fresh Radeon OpenCL/GPGPU benchmarks up shortly on Phoronix.