Re: Have Card, Will Travel

[Cordell Bloor <cgmb@slerp.xyz>]

Hi Summit,

To use ROCm on Debian, all you need to do is to install the libraries that your application requires via apt, then add your user to the video and render groups so that you have permission to use the GPU.

I'm not entirely sure why special permissions are required for access to GPU compute, but that's a decision made by systemd in assigning group ownership and permissions to devices. The render requirement was added a couple years ago for /dev/kfd.

There are undoubtedly many third party libraries and frameworks that make choices incompatible with Debian, like assuming that that ROCm is only ever installed in /opt/rocm. Those will have to be discovered and fixed one by one.

If you have trouble with anything specific, please feel free to reach out.

Sincerely,
Cory Bloor