ROCm 7.1.1: you can (not) build

41 points by juliethefoxcoon

svenstaro

I love style and Eva references!

Apart from that, ROCm is also really nasty to build on our big box in Arch Linux.

Irene

yes! what an incredibly stylish site! and very appropriate title....

it had never really occurred to me that I could just make a bibtex snippet for any webpage I host (see the footer). I should start doing that
- LunNova
  
  Really glad to hear this feedback on the style & site features. Makes me feel good about having put time into it ^_^
  - Irene
    
    you should feel good about it! :)
- FeepingCreature
  
  It's not great as a user either. ROCm is a solidly secondary reason why I'm on NVidia now.
- nonagoninf
  
  Thank you a million times for maintaining ROCm in nixpkgs, you have persistence that is seldomly seen! I originally imported Anthony's package set in nixpkgs and was kinda burned out maintaining it after maybe two ROCm releases (+ got a Python-centered job that was not very compatible with Nix).
  
  At work, we use Nix to build PyTorch x.y and x.(y-1), both for three CUDA versions, two ROCm versions, two XPU versions, Metal, and CPU. Even with ample hardware available, we at some point decided to switch over to Nix-package the ROCm/XPU RPMs and Python binary wheels, because a lot of things break with from-source builds every release [1]. Plus firing off 12 hours of builds to build all the combinations was not really helping to iterate quickly.
  
  Now we can add new ROCm versions in (sometimes) a few minutes, but we are totally cheating, which would be bad in nixpkgs itself for obvious reasons.
  
  Thanks again for the cool work and the write-up!
  
  [1] We need upstream-compatible PyTorch versions on release day, but use Nix for reproducibility + we can easily build other stuff on top.
- tazjin
  
  The footnote on the acronym killed me. No longer functions as an acronym! Incredible.
  - gioele
    
    ROCm = Radeon Open Compute Platform
    
    Using a lowercase letter to indicate the last letter of a work in an acronym/initialism/abbreviation is not that uncommon. I18n (internationalization) or Hz (Hertz), for example.
    
    LunNova
    
    If AMD went with that fine, but they directly said "Note, ROCm no longer functions as an acronym."
    
    Pistos
    
    Not sure those are equivalent. There's no initial letter (P) to go with the m -- unless we say the ROC part is standing in as the initial part.
  - wareya
    
    Oh, I know this one! Radeon Open Compute metaplatform!
- FrostKiwi
  
  What a quick excellent breakdown from the perspective of a maintainer. Evangelion references and original style, instant RSS sub from me.
- symgryph
  
  This seems kind of dumb since 7.2 is out. Works fine for me. Why would I use that old version?
  - sams
    
    It's a write up on the pain of packaging rocm. It's easily one of the most challenging suites that we have to deal with at the moment.
    
    It's not really specific to precisely 7.1.1.
    
    cajually
    
    Simultaneously it is the most difficult piece to get functioning optimally as a user.
  - puffnfresh
    
    The date of the article literally says 2026-02-22 and describes why nixpkgs takes a while to get new versions of ROCm.