Fedora 40 Looks To Ship AMD ROCm 6 For End-To-End Open-Source GPU Acceleration
Fedora has been among the Linux distributions already working on packaging up AMD's ROCm to make it easier to deploy this GPU compute solution on their platform. AMD's official packaging for ROCm has just been geared toward the enterprise Linux distributions of Ubuntu LTS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and CentOS and friends), and SUSE Enterprise Linux. This has often been a headache for those wanting to use AMD ROCm outside of the few officially supported enterprise Linux distributions. Debian, Fedora, and others have had varying degrees of success packaging this code to work on their platforms and to jive nicely within their package management solutions.
With Fedora 40 in April the plan is to have AMD ROCm 6.0 available for supporting recent Radeon GPUs as well as the likes of the new AMD Instinct MI300 series. This change proposal is being pursued by Red Hat's Tom Rix. The ROCm 6 change proposal for Fedora goes on to note:
"There has been positive feedback from the community for the ease of using and developing GPU accelerated applications within Fedora. Because of the interest in AI, the community has requested that ROCm support be added to PyTorch and other AI applications and frameworks. To address this feedback several packages are in the process of being added to Fedora including rocFFT rocSolver hipBLASLt MiOpen.
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Fedora has finally end-to-end open source GPU acceleration. The GPU hardware driver is in the linux kernel. The compiler is the system clang. The ROCm software stack provides the higher level libraries that enable other Fedora packages and user applications to be built entirely with Fedora."
The change proposal still needs to be approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but given the past work on ROCm support for Fedora and this being a rather straight-forward proposal, it will likely be approved and taken care of in time for Fedora 40 in April to deliver a nice and modern AMD open-source GPU compute stack nicely packaged for Fedora Server/Workstation users.
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