Some Radeon ROCm Packages Pending Review For Fedora

Earlier this month was word that Fedora developers were looking at packaging Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) to make it easier for their distribution users to enjoy this open-source Radeon GPU computing software from OpenCL to a TensorFlow port. Some of the early packages of ROCm are now under review for Fedora.

There's still a lot of work until the complete ROCm stack will be ready for offering via Fedora's package repository, but there is progress being made. Fortunately, Red Hat's Tom Stellard is one of those involved. Tom Stellard, of course, is the current Red Hat LLVM expert and former AMD/Radeon Linux developer who got his start years ago during Google Summer of Code and was heavily involved in the Radeon Linux stack prior to joining the ranks at Red Hat. Stellard should be quite capable of getting ROCm into good shape for Fedora.

Tom did recently comment that the main issues in packaging ROCm up for distributions is there are a lot of hard-coded paths (with the AMD expectation being ROCm is installed within /opt rather than the conventional system directories) and that ROCm bundles its own version of LLVM/Clang/LLD components rather than leveraging upstream versions of them. So there it becomes quite a challenge either getting ROCm adapted and working with the upstream LLVM components of the distribution or having to package up AMD's separate copy.

The good news is that as of a few days ago rocminfo and hcc (the ROCm Heterogeneous C++ Compiler) packages are ready for review as the first steps toward the entire ROCm stack for Fedora where eventually it will just be a dnf command away from deployment.