6 ms·

ROCm's software stack runs on what feels like Ubuntu LTS only (good luck on Debian or derivatives!), you need very specific PyTorch versions that work with ROCm

by posguy 4y ago

ROCm's software stack runs on what feels like Ubuntu LTS only (good luck on Debian or derivatives!), you need very specific PyTorch versions that work with ROCm (no running the bleeding edge easily), and running an old UEFI version (eg: 2 or more years old) often causes a no boot/no POST situation. ROCm is a fragile stack that works on a very small subset of AMD's hardware with 3 blessed Linux distros. It doesn't have to be this way, most APUs and GPUs from AMD should be able to run ROCm even on Debian, Nix, or a distro of the user's choosing. Thankfully some Instinct hardware is super underpriced, so if your willing to make the effort you can run things really fast for rather cheap :D

pclmulqdq 4y ago
And God help you if you want to program in actual ROCm rather than using a library like PyTorch or BLAS. There are basically no good manuals or usage guides, and the accompanying tooling is much harder to use than the CUDA equivalents (if they exist at all). On top of that, nobody has any examples outside of major libraries or HPC code (which were largely written by developers at AMD).
ioedward 4y ago
Where did you buy the Instinct hardware and what's a good price?
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  When I tried it, ebay was the place to go, and the price was about 1/10th the nvidia equivalent when comparing computing power. You pay for it in time instead.
  - incrudible 4y ago
    Maybe comparing raw specs, not accounting for software running slower, if at all. You pay for it in time, but also sanity.
mappu 4y ago
HIP/ROCm has been packaged in debian - all I had to do was `apt install libamdhip64-{5,dev}; pip install torch` and then Stable Diffusion would run, on amdgpu 6600XT, with no third party repos at all. It should be fine for AMD's packages to only work on their own blessed distros, that's normal behaviour for upstream. Then downstream distros will then repackage it to make it a good citizen in their distro.
- makomk 4y ago
  Those packages are only in Debian testing, and I think RDNA2 GPUs are the only consumer-level GPUs with reasonably good support in ROCm (and then probably only some of them). AMD also dragged their feet for a long time on supporting RDNA after it launched, and actually managed to break support for the only consumer GPUs that worked reasonably well with ROCm before that (the RX570 and similar) quite a while before they added support for RDNA.
buildbot 4y ago
Not discounting any of that, but it seems like a similar situation to early versions of cuda. Those really sucked to install.
- teruakohatu 4y ago
  I would argue cuda is still painful when you find yourself in some sort of edge case... The thought of using a stack that is worse gives me the creeps.
pabs3 4y ago
Debian bookworm will ship with a few bits of ROCm, and there are more things coming https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=debian-ai%40lists.debian.org https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=debian-ai%40lists.... https://tracker.debian.org/teams/rocm-team/ https://tracker.debian.org/teams/rocm-team/ https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/ https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/
gnufx 4y ago
> runs on what feels like Ubuntu LTS only It surely runs in the Cray environment (I assume still based on SuSE) on Frontier. There is ROCm packaging in Fedora/EPEL, provided by an AMD employee, but I don't know anything about it.

by posguy 4y ago

pclmulqdq 4y ago

And God help you if you want to program in actual ROCm rather than using a library like PyTorch or BLAS. There are basically no good manuals or usage guides, and the accompanying tooling is much harder to use than the CUDA equivalents (if they exist at all). On top of that, nobody has any examples outside of major libraries or HPC code (which were largely written by developers at AMD).

ioedward 4y ago

Where did you buy the Instinct hardware and what's a good price?

pclmulqdq 4y ago
When I tried it, ebay was the place to go, and the price was about 1/10th the nvidia equivalent when comparing computing power. You pay for it in time instead.
- incrudible 4y ago
  Maybe comparing raw specs, not accounting for software running slower, if at all. You pay for it in time, but also sanity.

mappu 4y ago

HIP/ROCm has been packaged in debian - all I had to do was `apt install libamdhip64-{5,dev}; pip install torch` and then Stable Diffusion would run, on amdgpu 6600XT, with no third party repos at all. It should be fine for AMD's packages to only work on their own blessed distros, that's normal behaviour for upstream. Then downstream distros will then repackage it to make it a good citizen in their distro.

makomk 4y ago
Those packages are only in Debian testing, and I think RDNA2 GPUs are the only consumer-level GPUs with reasonably good support in ROCm (and then probably only some of them). AMD also dragged their feet for a long time on supporting RDNA after it launched, and actually managed to break support for the only consumer GPUs that worked reasonably well with ROCm before that (the RX570 and similar) quite a while before they added support for RDNA.

buildbot 4y ago

Not discounting any of that, but it seems like a similar situation to early versions of cuda. Those really sucked to install.

teruakohatu 4y ago
I would argue cuda is still painful when you find yourself in some sort of edge case... The thought of using a stack that is worse gives me the creeps.

pabs3 4y ago

Debian bookworm will ship with a few bits of ROCm, and there are more things coming https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=debian-ai%40lists.debian.org https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=debian-ai%40lists.... https://tracker.debian.org/teams/rocm-team/ https://tracker.debian.org/teams/rocm-team/ https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/ https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/

gnufx 4y ago

> runs on what feels like Ubuntu LTS only It surely runs in the Cray environment (I assume still based on SuSE) on Frontier. There is ROCm packaging in Fedora/EPEL, provided by an AMD employee, but I don't know anything about it.