ROCm 1.9 Compute Components To Support Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

For those wanting to use the open-source ROCm Radeon Open eCosystem stack on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it will be supported by the next release.

The ROCm compute stack with OpenCL support will officially support Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the upcoming ROCm 1.9 release. Gregory Stoner of AMD's compute team confirmed today that 1.9 will indeed be supporting the Ubuntu LTS Bionic Beaver release.

If you need GPU compute support out of Radeon hardware on Ubuntu 18.04 today, there is the Radeon Software 18.20 Preview for Linux with early support.

Fortunately, moving forward the barrier to supporting new Linux distribution releases should be lower since as of Linux 4.17 and to be improved with Linux 4.18 is discrete GPU support working with ROCm from the mainline AMDKFD driver. But as we found out recently, AMD will continue maintaining multiple compute stacks and not all future hardware will necessarily have ROCm support.