AMD Hiring To Improve Their Linux Driver/ROCm Installation Process Across Distributions

AMD is hiring engineers to work on build and packaging of their "AMD Unified Linux Driver" to enhance the experience of deploying their packaged graphics driver stack -- including ROCm -- across different Linux distributions.

Currently the pre-built ROCm binaries and packaged "Radeon Software for Linux" driver stack just targets the main enterprise Linux distributions like Ubuntu LTS releases, SUSE Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Outside those enterprise Linux distributions and particular versions, there isn't much way in official support for those relying on these packaged driver components as opposed to just using the default upstream driver components shipped by each OS.

Some Linux users/packagers have resorted to re-packaging/re-building these enterprise-focused driver components for their own distribution. Others like Fedora and Debian have also taken to packaging up ROCm and associated software on their own so that they can be conveniently offered by their Linux distribution package management system. AMD's lack of a universal graphics driver package akin to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver installer has been a sore spot for those wanting to make use of ROCm compute on non-enterprise Linux environments. But it looks like things may be changing.

AMD is hiring multiple engineers to work on build/packaging for their Linux graphics software stack. Most interesting perhaps is these job postings citing a "AMD Unified Linux Driver"... A term not typically used for referring to the current AMD Linux graphics driver. When searching for the "AMD Unified Linux Driver" it turns up these AMD job postings as well as some past times I've made similar remarks on Phoronix.

This job posting sums up that given role as:

"AMD is looking for a specialized software engineer to join our Linux Build, Packaging and Install team. The successful candidate will be responsible for support, enhancement, improving efficiency and feature development of the AMD Unified Linux Driver build and packaging ecosystem, along with development and support of AMD Linux Driver Stack for major Linux distributions (in collaboration with open source community and distribution vendors). You will be a member of the core team of incredibly talented and highly motivated industry specialists and will work with the very latest graphics and compute hardware and software technology."

Great to hear and the responsibilities also cite a lot of cross-distribution packaging work. And more references to this AMD Unified Linux Driver: "Participation in maintaining the build, packaging, installation and publishing ecosystem of the AMD Unified Linux Driver".

There are other similar job postings as well all about Linux build and packaging of their graphics driver software.

Here's to hoping that the additional hires and any other "AMD Unified Linux Driver" changes make for an easier to deploy AMD Linux graphics driver experience across distributions, especially leading-edge distributions and other non-enterprise environments, for lowering the barrier of deploying ROCm compute support.