AMD ROCm 5.0.1 Released - Begins Moving HIPCC/HIPCONFIG From Perl Scripts To Binaries

Last week marked the release of the big AMD ROCm 5.0 update to the Radeon open-source GPU compute stack. Out already is now ROCM 5.0.1 with documentation updates as well as initiating the change around the hipcc and hipconfig commands moving forward.

The ROCm 5.0.1 release notes do note of documentation updates for AMD's new portal at docs.amd.com, which launched as part of ROCm 5.0. But besides that documentation work the only changes with ROCm 5.0.1 mentioned pertain to refactoring of hipcc and hipconfig.

Moving forward AMD wants to eventually replace HIPCC/HIPCONFIG that are currently Perl script launchers to the HIP compiler and attaining the HIP configuration to instead be calling binaries to actual compiled code directly. The release notes state:

In prior ROCm releases, by default, the hipcc/hipconfig Perl scripts were used to identify and set target compiler options, target platform, compiler, and runtime appropriately. In ROCm v5.0.1, hipcc.bin and hipconfig.bin have been added as the compiled binary implementations of the hipcc and hipconfig. These new binaries are currently a work-in-progress, considered, and marked as experimental. ROCm plans to fully transition to hipcc.bin and hipconfig.bin in the a future ROCm release. The existing hipcc and hipconfig Perl scripts are renamed to hipcc.pl and hipconfig.pl respectively. New top-level hipcc and hipconfig Perl scripts are created, which can switch between the Perl script or the compiled binary based on the environment variable HIPCC_USE_PERL_SCRIPT. In ROCm 5.0.1, by default, this environment variable is set to use hipcc and hipconfig through the Perl scripts. Subsequently, Perl scripts will no longer be available in ROCm in a future release.

That's it for ROCm 5.0.1 at least for the official changes. Download details on ROCm 5.0.1 are available from GitHub.