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Hardware support is key, though. CUDA works with basically any card made in the last 5 years, consumer or compute. ROCm seems to work with a limited set of com

Hardware support is key, though. CUDA works with basically any card made in the last 5 years, consumer or compute. ROCm seems to work with a limited set of compute cards only. There's a ROCm team in Debian [1] trying to push ROCm forward (ROCm being open), but just getting supported hardware alone is already a major roadblock, which stalls the effort, and hence any contributions Debian could give back. [1] https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team

slavik81 6y ago
I didn't know about the Debian team. Thank you very much for informing me! I'm not sure how much I can do, but I would be happy to discuss with them the obstacles they are facing and see what I can help with. I'm better positioned to help with software issues than hardware matters, but I would love to hear about ROCm from their perspective. What's the best way to contact the team?
- ckastner 6y ago
  The team's communication channel is the Debian AI mailing list [1], and they'd absolutely appreciate someone reaching out. Having ROCm succeed is a mutual interest. From what I recall, on the software side, I think the difficulties stemmed from ROCm being distributed (naturally, of course) as a vendor would do it, for example: targeting specific kernels, compilers, distribution versions. The problem with this is that all these may become out of date, which means that the GitHub instructions may no longer work for anyone wanting to give it a try. This was the case for some of the team members attempting to rebuild some of the packages. The Debian team would prefer to package all elements of the ROCm ecosystem and include them in the official Debian archive, so that users can just run `apt-get install rocm-something` without worrying about the kernel version etc., just as they can already do a trivial `apt-get install nvidia-cuda-toolkit`. I think collaboration with AMD here would be mutually beneficial, as on the one hand, Debian wants FOSS accelerated computing, which AMD is pushing, and on the other hand, Debian is naturally experienced in distributing things for Debian, Ubuntu, etc., something AMD could benefit from. Thank you for engaging! [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/ https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/

slavik81 6y ago

I didn't know about the Debian team. Thank you very much for informing me! I'm not sure how much I can do, but I would be happy to discuss with them the obstacles they are facing and see what I can help with. I'm better positioned to help with software issues than hardware matters, but I would love to hear about ROCm from their perspective. What's the best way to contact the team?

ckastner 6y ago
The team's communication channel is the Debian AI mailing list [1], and they'd absolutely appreciate someone reaching out. Having ROCm succeed is a mutual interest. From what I recall, on the software side, I think the difficulties stemmed from ROCm being distributed (naturally, of course) as a vendor would do it, for example: targeting specific kernels, compilers, distribution versions. The problem with this is that all these may become out of date, which means that the GitHub instructions may no longer work for anyone wanting to give it a try. This was the case for some of the team members attempting to rebuild some of the packages. The Debian team would prefer to package all elements of the ROCm ecosystem and include them in the official Debian archive, so that users can just run `apt-get install rocm-something` without worrying about the kernel version etc., just as they can already do a trivial `apt-get install nvidia-cuda-toolkit`. I think collaboration with AMD here would be mutually beneficial, as on the one hand, Debian wants FOSS accelerated computing, which AMD is pushing, and on the other hand, Debian is naturally experienced in distributing things for Debian, Ubuntu, etc., something AMD could benefit from. Thank you for engaging! [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/ https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/