ROCm Installation Options (Linux)#

Applies to Linux

2023-06-02

5 min read time

Users installing ROCm must choose between various installation options. A new user should follow the Quick Start guide.

Distro Package Manager Commands versus AMDGPU Installer?#

Users can install the same packages via two CLI interfaces as follows:

  • Linux distro package manager commands.

  • a proprietary installer known as the amdgpu-install script

There is no difference in the final installation state when choosing either CLI.

Integrating with the distribution’s package manager lets the user install, upgrade and uninstall using familiar commands and workflows. Third party ecosystem support is the same as your OS package manager.

The amdgpu-install script is a wrapper around the package manager. The same packages are installed by this script as the package manager system.

Standard (Single Version) ROCm install versus Multi-Version#

ROCm packages are versioned with both semantic versioning that is package specific and a ROCm release version.

Single-version Installation#

The single-version ROCm installation refers to the following:

  • Installation of a single instance of the ROCm release on a system

  • Use of non-versioned ROCm meta-packages

Multi-version Installation#

The multi-version installation refers to the following:

  • Installation of multiple instances of the ROCm stack on a system. Extending the package name and its dependencies with the release version adds the ability to support multiple versions of packages simultaneously.

  • Use of versioned ROCm meta-packages.

Note

Multiversion install is not available for the AMDGPU stack.

The following image demonstrates the difference between single-version and multi-version ROCm installation types:

Fig. 1 ROCm Installation Types#