Are You Ready to ROCK?

The ROCm Platform brings a rich foundation to advanced computing by seamlessly integrating the CPU and GPU with the goal of solving real-world problems.

Supported CPUs

Starting with ROCm 1.8 we have relexed the use PCIe Atomics and also PCIe Lane choice for Vega10/GFX9 class GPU. So now you can support CPU without PCIe Atomics and also use Gen2 x1 lanes.

Currently our GFX8 GPU's (Fiji & Polaris family) still need to use PCIe Gen 3 and PCIe Atomics, but are looking at relaxing this in a future release, once we have fully tested firmware.

Current CPUs which support PCIe Gen3 + PCIe Atomics are:

• AMD Ryzen CPUs;
• AMD EPYC CPUs;
• Intel Xeon E7 V3 or newer CPUs;
• Intel Xeon E5 v3 or newer CPUs;
• Intel Xeon E3 v3 or newer CPUs;
• Intel Core i7 v4, Core i5 v4, Core i3 v4 or newer CPUs (i.e. Haswell family or newer).

For Fiji and Polaris GPU's the ROCm platform leverages PCIe Atomics (Fetch and Add, Compare and Swap, Unconditional Swap, AtomicsOp Completion). PCIe atomics PCIe Atomics are only supported on PCIe Gen3 enabled CPUs and PCIe Gen3 switches like Broadcom PLX. When you install your GPUs make sure you install them in a fully PCIe Gen3 x16 or x8, x4 or x1 slot attached either directly to the CPU's Root I/O controller or via a PCIe switch directly attached to the CPU's Root I/O controller. In our experience many issues stem from trying to use consumer motherboards which provide physical x16 connectors that are electrically connected as e.g. PCIe Gen2 x4 connected via the Southbridge PCIe I/O controller.

Experimental support for our GFX7 GPUs Radeon R9 290, R9 390, AMD FirePro S9150, S9170 note they do not support or take advantage of PCIe Atomics. However, we still recommend that you use a CPU from the list provided above.

Not supported or very limited support under ROCm

Limited support

• With ROCm 1.8 and Vega10 it should support PCIe Gen2 enabled CPUs such as the AMD Opteron, Phenom, Phenom II, Athlon, Athlon X2, Athlon II and older Intel Xeon and Intel Core Architecture and Pentium CPUs. But we have done very limited testing. Since our test farm today has been catering to CPU listed above. This is where we need community support.
• Thunderbolt 1,2 and 3 enabled breakout boxes GPU's should now be able to work with ROCm. Thunderbolt 1 and 2 are PCIe Gen2 based. But we have done no testing on this config and would need comunity support do limited access to this type of equipment

Not supported

• We also do not support AMD Carrizo and Kaveri APU as host for compliant dGPU attachments.
• Thunderbolt 1 and 2 enabled GPU's are not supported by ROCm. Thunderbolt 1 & 2 are PCIe Gen2 based.
• AMD Carrizo based APUs have limited support due to OEM & ODM's choices when it comes to some key configuration parameters. On point, we have observed that Carrizo laptops, AIOs and desktop systems showed inconsistencies in exposing and enabling the System BIOS parameters required by the ROCm stack. Before purchasing a Carrizo system for ROCm, please verify that the BIOS provides an option for enabling IOMMUv2. If this is the case, the final requirement is associated with correct CRAT table support - please inquire with the OEM about the latter.
• AMD Merlin/Falcon Embedded System is also not currently supported by the public repo.
• AMD Raven Ridge APU are currently not supported

New features to ROCm 1.8

DKMS driver installation

• Debian packages are provided for DKMS on Ubuntu
• RPM packages are provided for CentOS/RHEL 7.4 support
• See the ROCT-Thunk-Interface and ROCK-Kernel-Driver for additional documentation on driver setup

New distribution suppport

• Binary package support for Ubuntu 16.04
• Binary package support for CentoOS 7.4
• Binary package support for RHEL 7.4

Improved OpenMPI via UCX support

• UCX support for OpenMPI
• ROCm RDMA

The latest ROCm platform - ROCm 1.8

The latest tested version of the drivers, tools, libraries and source code for the ROCm platform have been released and are available under the roc-1.8.x or rocm-1.8.x tag of the following GitHub repositories:

• ROCK-Kernel-Driver
• ROCR-Runtime
• ROCT-Thunk-Interface
• ROC-smi
• HCC compiler
• compiler-runtime
• HIP
• HIP-Examples
• atmi

Additionally, the following mirror repositories that support the HCC compiler are also available on GitHub, and frozen for the rocm-1.8.0 release:

• llvm
• ldd
• hcc-clang-upgrade
• ROCm-Device-Libs

Supported Operating Systems - New operating systems available

The ROCm 1.8 platform has been tested on the following operating systems:

• Ubuntu 16.04
• CentOS 7.4 (Using devetoolset-7 runtime support)
• RHEL 7.4 (Using devetoolset-7 runtime support)

Installing from AMD ROCm repositories

AMD is hosting both Debian and RPM repositories for the ROCm 1.8 packages at this time.

The packages in the Debian repository have been signed to ensure package integrity.

Installing from a Debian repository

First make sure your system is up to date

sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt install libnuma-dev
sudo reboot

Optional: Upgrade to 4.13 kernel

Although not required, it is recommended as of ROCm 1.8.0 that the system's kernel is upgraded to the latest 4.13 version available:

sudo apt install linux-headers-4.13.0-32-generic linux-image-4.13.0-32-generic linux-image-extra-4.13.0-32-generic linux-signed-image-4.13.0-32-generic
sudo reboot 

Add the ROCm apt repository

For Debian based systems, like Ubuntu, configure the Debian ROCm repository as follows:

wget -qO - http://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/debian/rocm.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo deb [arch=amd64] http://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/debian/ xenial main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list'

The gpg key might change, so it may need to be updated when installing a new release. The current rocm.gpg.key is not avialable in a standard key ring distribution, but has the following sha1sum hash:

f0d739836a9094004b0a39058d046349aacc1178 rocm.gpg.key

Install

Next, update the apt repository list and install the rocm package:

Warning

: Before proceeding, make sure to completely uninstall any previous ROCm package:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install rocm-dkms

Next set your permissions

With move to upstreaming the KFD driver and the support of DKMS, for all Console aka headless user, you will need to add all your users to the 'video" group by setting the Unix permissions

Configure Ensure that your user account is a member of the "video" group prior to using the ROCm driver. You can find which groups you are a member of with the following command:

groups

To add yourself to the video group you will need the sudo password and can use the following command:

sudo usermod -a -G video $LOGNAME 

Once complete, reboot your system.

Upon Reboot run

rocminfo 
clinfo 

If you have an Install Issue please read this FAQ .

Upon restart, to test your OpenCL instance

Build and run Hello World OCL app.

HelloWorld sample:

 wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bgaster/opencl-book-samples/master/src/Chapter_2/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.cpp
 wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bgaster/opencl-book-samples/master/src/Chapter_2/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.cl

Build it using the default ROCm OpenCL include and library locations:

g++ -I /opt/rocm/opencl/include/ ./HelloWorld.cpp -o HelloWorld -L/opt/rocm/opencl/lib/x86_64 -lOpenCL

Run it:

./HelloWorld

How to un-install from Ubuntu 16.04

To un-install the entire rocm development package execute:

sudo apt autoremove rocm-dkms

Installing development packages for cross compilation

It is often useful to develop and test on different systems. In this scenario, you may prefer to avoid installing the ROCm Kernel to your development system.

In this case, install the development subset of packages:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install rocm-dev

Note: To execute ROCm enabled apps you will require a system with the full ROCm driver stack installed

Removing pre-release packages

If you installed any of the ROCm pre-release packages from github, they will need to be manually un-installed:

sudo apt purge libhsakmt
sudo apt purge compute-firmware
sudo apt purge $(dpkg -l | grep 'kfd\|rocm' | grep linux | grep -v libc | awk '{print $2}')

If possible, we would recommend starting with a fresh OS install.

CentOS/RHEL 7 Support

Support for CentOS/RHEL 7 has been added in ROCm 1.8, but requires a special runtime environment provided by the RHEL Software Collections and additional dkms support packages to properly install in run.

Preparing RHEL 7 for installation

RHEL is a subscription based operating system, and must enable several external repositories to enable installation of the devtoolset-7 environment and the DKMS support files. These steps are not required for CentOS.

First, the subscription for RHEL must be enabled and attached to a pool id. Please see Obtaining an RHEL image and license page for instructions on registering your system with the RHEL subscription server and attaching to a pool id.

Second, enable the following repositories:

sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-rhscl-rpms
sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-optional-rpms
sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-extras-rpms

Third, enable additional repositories by downloading and installing the epel-release-latest-7 repository RPM:

sudo rpm -ivh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Install and setup Devtoolset-7

To setup the Devtoolset-7 environment, follow the instructions on this page:

https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/devtoolset-7/

Note that devtoolset-7 is a Software Collections package, and is not supported by AMD.

Prepare CentOS/RHEL 7.4 for DKMS Install

Installing kernel drivers on CentOS/RHEL 7.4 requires dkms tool being installed:

sudo yum install -y epel-release
sudo yum install -y dkms kernel-headers-`uname -r`

At this point they system can install ROCm using the DKMS drivers.

Installing ROCm on the system At this point ROCm can be installed on the target system. Create a /etc/yum.repos.d/rocm.repo file with the following contents:

[ROCm]
name=ROCm
baseurl=http://repo.radeon.com/rocm/yum/rpm
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

The repo's URL should point to the location of the repositories repodata database. Install ROCm components using these commands:

sudo yum install rocm-dkms

The rock-dkms component should be installed and the /dev/kfd device should be available on reboot.

Ensure that your user account is a member of the "video" or "wheel" group prior to using the ROCm driver. You can find which groups you are a member of with the following command:

groups

To add yourself to the video (or wheel) group you will need the sudo password and can use the following command:

sudo usermod -a -G video $LOGNAME 

Current release supports up to CentOS/RHEL 7.4. If for any reason the system needs to be updated to 7.5, don’t update the kernel. Add “--exclude=kernel*” flag to yum install. For example:

sudo yum update --exclude=kernel*

Compiling applications using hcc, hip, etc.

To compile applications or samples, please use gcc-7.2 provided by the devtoolset-7 environment. To do this, compile all applications after running this command:

scl enable devtoolset-7 bash

How to un-install ROCm from CentOS/RHEL 7.4

To un-install the entire rocm development package execute:

sudo yum autoremove rocm-dkms

Known Issues / Workarounds

If you Plan to Run with X11 - we are seeing X freezes under load

ROCm 1.8.0 a kernel parameter noretry has been set to 1 to improve overall system performance. However it has been proven to bring instability to graphics driver shipped with Ubuntu. This is an ongoing issue and we are looking into it.

Before that, please try apply this change by changing noretry bit to 0.

echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/module/amdkfd/parameters/noretry

Files under /sys won't be preserved after reboot so you'll need to do it every time.

One way to keep noretry=0 is to change /etc/modprobe.d/amdkfd.conf and make it be:

options amdkfd noretry=0

Once it's done, run sudo update-initramfs -u. Reboot and verify /sys/module/amdkfd/parameters/noretry stays as 0.

If you are you are using hipCaffe Alexnet training on ImageNet - we are seeing sporadic hangs of hipCaffe during training

Closed source components

The ROCm platform relies on a few closed source components to provide legacy functionality like HSAIL finalization and debugging/profiling support. These components are only available through the ROCm repositories, and will either be deprecated or become open source components in the future. These components are made available in the following packages:

• hsa-ext-rocr-dev

Getting ROCm source code

Modifications can be made to the ROCm 1.8 components by modifying the open source code base and rebuilding the components. Source code can be cloned from each of the GitHub repositories using git, or users can use the repo command and the ROCm 1.8 manifest file to download the entire ROCm 1.8 source code.

Installing repo

Google's repo tool allows you to manage multiple git repositories simultaneously. You can install it by executing the following commands:

curl https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

Note: make sure ~/bin exists and it is part of your PATH

Cloning the code

mkdir ROCm && cd ROCm
repo init -u https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm.git -b roc-1.8.0
repo sync

These series of commands will pull all of the open source code associated with the ROCm 1.8 release. Please ensure that ssh-keys are configured for the target machine on GitHub for your GitHub ID.

• OpenCL Runtime and Compiler will be submitted to the Khronos Group, prior to the final release, for conformance testing.