ROCm/docs/understand/installing_linux.md

Installation Overview (Linux)

This chapter provides an overview of ROCm™ installation.

About This Document

This document is intended for users familiar with Linux® and discusses the installation/uninstallation of ROCm on the various Linux distributions.

The rest of this document refers to _Radeon™ Software for Linux_ as the AMDGPU
stack and _amdgpu-dkms_ driver as the kernel-mode driver.

The guide provides instructions for the following:

• Kernel-mode driver installation
• ROCm single-version and multiversion installation
• ROCm and kernel-mode driver version upgrade
• ROCm single-version and multiversion uninstallation
• Kernel-mode driver uninstallation

Installation Methods

It is customary for Linux installers to integrate into the system's package manager. There are two notable groups of package sources:

• AMD-hosted repositories maintained by AMD available to register on supported Linux distribution versions. For a complete list of AMD-supported platforms, refer to the article: GPU and OS Support.
• Distribution-hosted repositories maintained by the developer of said Linux distribution. These require little to no setup from the user, but aren't tested by AMD. For support on these installations, contact the relevant maintainers.

AMD also provides installer scripts for those that wish to drive installations in a more manual fashion.

Package Licensing

AQL Profiler and AOCC CPU optimization are both provided in binary form, each
subject to the license agreement enclosed in the directory for the binary and is
available here: `/opt/rocm/share/doc/rocm-llvm-alt/EULA`. By using, installing,
copying or distributing AQL Profiler and/or AOCC CPU Optimizations, you agree to
the terms and conditions of this license agreement. If you do not agree to the
terms of this agreement, do not install, copy or use the AQL Profiler and/or the
AOCC CPU Optimizations.

Acces the EULA agreement at: https://www.amd.com/en/support/gpu-pro-eula

For the rest of the ROCm packages, you can find the licensing information at the following location: /opt/rocm/share/doc/<component-name>/

For example, you can fetch the licensing information of the amd_comgr component (Code Object Manager) from the amd_comgr folder. A file named LICENSE.txt contains the license details at: /opt/rocm-5.4.3/share/doc/amd_comgr/LICENSE.txt

Package Manager Integration

Integrating with the distribution's package manager let's the user install, upgrade and uninstall using familiar commands and workflows. The actual commands vary from distribution to distribution. For more information, refer to Package Manager Integration.

Installer Script

The amdgpu-install script streamlines the installation process by:

• Abstracting the distribution-specific package installation logic
• Performing the repository setup
• Allowing you to specify the use case and automating the installation of all the required packages
• Installing multiple ROCm releases simultaneously on a system
• Automating updating local repository information through enhanced functionality of the amdgpu-install script
• Performing post-install checks to verify whether the installation was completed successfully
• Upgrading the installed ROCm release
• Uninstalling the installed single-version or multiversion ROCm releases

The installer script is provided for convenience. It doesn't do anything the
user otherwise couldn't. It automates some tasks surrounding installation, such
as registering/unregistering and driving the system's package manager, but the
bulk of the work will still be done by the system's package manager. As is the
case with most convenience wrappers, some degree of customization is lost for
the sake of simplicity.

Use cases

The installer script introduces the notion of "use cases", which denote usage patterns or reasons why someone installs ROCm. This is to allow users to install only a subset of the ROCm ecosystem, parts concerning them, resulting in smaller installation footprint and faster installs/upgrades.

Some of the ROCm-specific use cases the installer supports are:

• OpenCL (ROCr/KFD based) runtime
• HIP runtimes
• ROCm libraries and applications
• ROCm Compiler and device libraries
• Kernel-mode driver

For more information, refer to the How to Install ROCm section in this guide.

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Installation types

This section discusses the single-version and multiversion installation of the ROCm software stack.

Single-version Installation

The single-version ROCm installation refers to the following:

• Installation of a single instance of the ROCm release on a system
• Use of non-versioned ROCm meta-packages

Multi-version Installation

The multiversion installation refers to the following:

• Installation of multiple instances of the ROCm stack on a system. Extending the package name and its dependencies with the release version adds the ability to support multiple versions of packages simultaneously.
• Use of versioned ROCm meta-packages.

Multiversion install is not available for the AMDGPU stack.

The following image demonstrates the difference between single-version and multiversion ROCm installation types:

<img src="../data/understand/installing_linux/image.001.png" alt="">

ROCm Installation Types