Towards mature AMD GPU compute support
Hello everyone,
I've been volunteering with the Debian community to help enhance support
for AMD GPU compute for nearly four years [1]. We've made enormous
progress in the packaging and integration of ROCm in that time, but
there's still a long ways to go. The reality is that I still often have
to tell people, "the support for ROCm on Debian is incomplete and the
pieces you need are not yet available in main."
I'm pleased to announce that starting on March 10th, 2025, my volunteer
work will become my full-time job. I am moving into a new role at AMD
that has been created specifically to facilitate the integration of AMD
GPU compute support into the Debian and Ubuntu operating systems. My
long-term goal is to bring the out-of-the-box support for AMD GPU
hardware on Debian up to the level that I can recommend it to any user,
from consumers buying a low-end AMD Radeon RX 7600 GPU for their
workstation, to enterprises purchasing AMD Instinct MI325X GPU servers.
However, if I am being realistic, it will take both significant time and
further investments from AMD to reach that level of maturity.
My initial goal will be to get the ROCm packages in Debian updated from
ROCm 5.7 to ROCm 6.3 and to prepare a pytorch-rocm package. I'm
uncertain of what can be completed in time for Debian Trixie (as I will
barely have any time to work on this in February). If that goal is to be
achieved for Trixie, it will probably be as a result of hard work by
other members of the Debian ROCm Team. The transitions required for key
packages will need to begin before I will be able to give Debian my full
attention. Sadly, the timing is such that my new role will mostly
benefit Forky (and maybe backports for older systems).
In any case, please know that I am here to support you in any of your
work relating to AMD GPU support in the packages that you maintain. As
of next month, it is literally my job.
Sincerely,
Cory Bloor
[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/2021/03/msg00009.html
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