Two useful bits of ROCm news today for those interested in AMD's open-source GPU compute stack.

First up, ROCm's TheRock 7.11 is now available. This is an experimental release in the road to what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0... For those that missed it last October, AMD [1]released ROCm 7.9 as a "technology preview" paired with TheRock build system . ROCm 7.9+ are technology preview releases while the ROCm 7.0 to less than 7.9 continue to be the stable versions... [2]ROCm 7.10 came in December as a technology preview release while 7.11 is out today for shipping the latest ROCm components paired with TheRock for building out the AMD GPU compute software packages.

I haven't found any concise change-log for the ROCm/TheRock 7.11 changes but there is a lot of Git activity going on from improving various hardware support to new optimizations and features. Again, 7.11 being just a technology preview toward the next major feature release presumably during the second half of the year.

Those wanting to build this 7.11 release for the leading-edge ROCm/HIP stack can find the new version up on [3]GitHub .

The other piece of news today is progress on getting the AMD ROCm packages as part of the Ubuntu package archive for an improved experience of using AMD ROCm on Ubuntu Linux without having to add any extra/third-party repositories. Canonical has been [4]planning to distribute AMD ROCm libraries with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS due out in April.

Today a Canonical engineer has [5]applied for Ubuntu Developer Membership so there are upload rights for the new ROCm packages. Talha Can Havadar has been working on these ROCm packages for Ubuntu and is now applying to have upload permissions so that these packages can be pushed into the Ubuntu archive:

amdsmi

rocm-llvm

rocm

rocm-cmake

rocm-smi-lib

pkg-rocm-tools

rocr-runtime

hipify

rocm-core

hipblas-common

rocalution

rocm-hipamd

rocminfo

rocrand

rocdbgapi

rccl

composable-kernel

hiprand

rocprim

roctracer

rocblas

rocfft

rocsparse

rocthrust

hipcub

hipfft

hipsparse

rocsolver

rocwmma

hipblas

hipsolver

hipblaslt

hipsparselt

MIOpen

Basically a formality for Ubuntu Developer Membership. With being a Canonical engineer and this being a strategic project for Ubuntu 26.04, the necessary permissions will likely be granted soon.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/ROCm-Core-SDK-7.9

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-7.10-Released

[3] https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock/releases/tag/therock-7.11

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-Ubuntu-26.04-LTS

[5] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/application-rocm-package-set-talha-can-havadar/76780