ROCm VS KernelAbstractions.jl

Yep, did exactly that. IMO he threw a fit, even though AMD was working with him squashing bugs. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

I don't know if they'll ultimately succeed or not, but they at least seem to be putting genuine effort into this. ROCm releases are coming out at a relatively nice clip[1], including a new release just a week or two ago[2].

[1]: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/releases

[2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-5.7-Released

Ok, I wonder what's wrong. maybe it's this? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4959621/error-1001-in-cl...

Nope. Anything about this on the arch wiki? Nope

This bug report[2] from 2021? Maybe I need to update my groups.

[2]: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1411

    $ ls -la /dev/kfd

HMM is, I believe, a Linux feature.

AMD added HMM support in ROCm 5.0 according to this: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/blob/develop/CHANG...

Woot AMD now supports APU? I sold my notebook as i hit a wall when trying rocm [1] Is there a list oft Wirkung apu's ?

[1] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1587

I think geohot is working on that with tinygrad. Activity on the ROCm repo seems to have increased a lot recently:

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/graphs/code-freque...

Last I heard he's abandoned working with AMD products.

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

[1] links to https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198 which has all the context (driver bugs, vowing to stop using AMD, Lisa Su's response that they're committed to fixing this stuff, a comment that it's fixed)

They're talking about the meltdown he had on stream [1] (in front of the mentioned pirate flag), that ended with him saying he'd stop using AMD hardware [2]. He recanted this two weeks after talking with AMD [3].

Maybe he'll succeed, but this definitely doesn't scream stability to me. I'd be wary of investing money into his ventures (but then I'm not a VC, so what do I know).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU

[2] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

[3] https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/166980346408248934...

He flamed out, then is back after Lisa Su called him (lmao)

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-div...

On a personal level that youtube doesn't make him come off looking that good... like people are trying to get patches to him and generally soothe him/damage control and he's just being a bit of a manchild. And it sounds like that's the general course of events around a lot of his "efforts".

On the other hand he's not wrong either, having this private build inside AMD and not even validating official, supported configurations for the officially supported non-private builds they show to the world isn't a good look, and that's just the very start of the problems around ROCm. AMD's OpenCL runtime was never stable or good either and every experience I've heard with it was "we spent so much time fighting AMD-specific runtime bugs and specs jank that what we ended up with was essentially vendor-proprietary anyway".

On the other other hand, it sounds like AMD know this is a mess and has some big stability/maturity improvements in the pipeline. It seems clear from some of the smoke coming out of the building that they're cooking on more general ROCm support for RDNA cards, and generally working to patch the maturity and stability issues he's talking about. I hate the "wait for drivers/new software release bro it's gonna fix everything" that surrounds AMD products but in this case I'm at least hopeful they seem to understand the problem, even if it's completely absurdly late.

Some of what he was viewing as "the process happening in secret" was likely people doing rush patches on the latest build to accommodate him, and he comes off as berating them over it. Again, like, that stream just comes off as "mercurial manchild" not coding genius. And everyone knew the driver situation is bad, that's why there's notionally alpha for him to realize here in the first place. He's bumping into moneymakers, and getting mad about it.

For myself, I use Julia to write my own software (that is run on AMD supercomputer) on Fedora system, using 6800XT. For my experience, everything worked nicely. To install you need to install rocm-opencl package with dnf, AMD Julia package (AMDGPU.jl), add yourself to video group and you are good to go. Also, Julia's KernelAbstractions.jl is a good to have, when writing portable code.

>Higher level abstractions

like these?

https://github.com/JuliaGPU/KernelAbstractions.jl

For kernel programming, https://github.com/JuliaGPU/KernelAbstractions.jl (shortened to KA) is what the JuliaGPU team has been developing as a unified programming interface for GPUs of any flavor. It's not significantly different from the (basically identical) interfaces exposed by CUDA.jl and AMDGPU.jl, so it's easy to transition to. I think the event system in KA is also far superior to CUDA's native synchronization system, since it allows one to easily express graphs of dependencies between kernels and data transfers.