Fedora Makes Progress On Radeon ROCm Packages, But Still Needs To Land OpenCL / HIP

Last year Fedora developers and users were discussing the packaging of ROCm components to make it easier to deploy this Radeon open-source GPU compute stack. Five months later, some of the Radeon Open eCosystem components have made it into Fedora for easier installation but the HIP and OpenCL front-ends to ROCm haven't yet been successfully packaged.

Jeremy Newton who works for AMD but is a Fedora contributor and working on these packages in his own personal time provided an update on the current AMD ROCm packaging effort. He was able to get some of the ROCm packages bundled up for Fedora but the main blocker is needing to get a front-end like ROCm's OpenCL or the ROCm HIP bits for porting from CUDA to be packaged so this work will be useful to end-users.

Some AMD ROCm packages are available on Fedora 36 but not yet enough for end-users wanting to begin enjoying OpenCL and HIP porting of CUDA code for Radeon GPU acceleration on this popular distro. AMD's formal position for ROCm packages is focused on the major enterprise Linux distributions and where they host their official packages.

Jeremy did setup a ROCm OpenCL Copr repository for those wanting to try out his experimental packages on that front. He noted, "They're a bit rough around the edges, but ultimately I don't have the ability to be a primary maintainer for these. With that said, I encourage anyone to freely take my work as a starting point. I would also be interested in non-commitally helping keep packages up to date if they land in Fedora."

Packaging ROCm HIP for Fedora is more complicated than the OpenCL support. He also noted some complications with the ROCm design, "I think the one thing that bugs me the most is the bundling. Both of them bundle a static library called "ROCclr" and some older OpenCL headers. HIP also bundles some of rocm-opencl, along with a khronos header."

See this mailing list thread for the latest updates on ROCm packages for Fedora.