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AMD Radeon & ROCm Acceleration Stack

Supported hardware: AMD Radeon RX 6000/7000/8000 series, Ryzen APUs, Radeon Pro, and AMD Instinct MI200/MI300 series.

1. AMD Mesa Graphics Stack (*-amd)

  • Use Case: Video transcoding, lightweight 3D rendering, desktop acceleration, and general GPU passthrough.
  • Packages: mesa-va-drivers (radeonsi), mesa-vulkan-drivers (radv), libdrm-amdgpu1.
  • Diagnostics: vainfo, vulkan-tools.
  • CDI: Generates /etc/cdi/amd.yaml granting container access to /dev/dri/card* and /dev/dri/renderD*.

2. AMD ROCm Compute Stacks (*-amd-rocm / *-rocm)

imago segments AMD compute into ROCm Legacy and ROCm Bleeding-Edge:

Version pins and apt source

versions.json (drivers.amd) holds every coordinate 32-gpu-amd-rocm.sh fetches:

Field Value Use
rocm_bleeding_version 7.2.4 the ROCm release the image installs (ROCM_VERSION)
rocm_legacy_version 6.4.4 the last 6.x release; pinned, not yet installed by any flavor
rocm_repo https://repo.radeon.com/rocm key rocm.gpg.key and apt/<version> live below it
rocm_apt_suite noble the apt suite of the ROCm repository

AMD publishes ROCm for Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy) and 24.04 (noble) only. The image is Ubuntu 26.04 (resolute), so it installs the noble packages, and the provisioner prints that substitution in the build log. The Ubuntu 26.04 archive also ships an older ROCm (7.1); an apt pin (/etc/apt/preferences.d/rocm-pin-600, priority 600 for o=repo.radeon.com, as in AMD's install guide) keeps apt from mixing the two.

tools/ci/upstream_sources.py check requests the key and the Release file of every pinned version before the Packer build in release-matrix.yml; a pin AMD does not publish fails that step in seconds. The same check covers the other flavors' pins (see NVIDIA):

python3 -I tools/ci/upstream_sources.py urls    # list the URLs
python3 -I tools/ci/upstream_sources.py check   # exit 1 names each URL that did not answer 200

Installed packages

  • Packages: rocm-hip-runtime, rocminfo, hwinfo.
  • Use Case: RDNA 2/3/4 Radeon and Instinct accelerators covered by the ROCm 7.2 support matrix.
  • Kernel & Memory: Configured with 48-bit GPU virtual addressing, IOMMU page tables, and HugeTLB support.
  • Permissions: Udev rule pre-configured at /etc/udev/rules.d/70-kfd.rules granting the render group full read/write access to /dev/kfd.
  • CDI Specification: Generates /etc/cdi/amd.yaml with explicit /dev/kfd and /dev/dri device bindings for rootless container execution.

Verifying AMD ROCm & Mesa

# Check ROCm hardware discovery and HIP runtime
rocminfo

# Verify Mesa VA-API hardware acceleration
vainfo --display drm --device /dev/dri/renderD128