Installation prerequisites#

Applies to Linux

2024-03-25

5 min read time

Before installing ROCm, complete the following prerequisites.

  1. Confirm the system has a supported Linux version.

    a. To obtain the Linux distribution information, type the following command on your system from the Command Line Interface (CLI):

    uname -m && cat /etc/*release

    b. Confirm that your Linux distribution matches a supported distribution.

    Example: Running the preceding command on an Ubuntu system produces the following output:

    x86_64
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=20.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=focal
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS"

  2. Verify the kernel version.

    1. To check the kernel version of your Linux system, type the following command:

      uname -srmv

      Example: The preceding command lists the kernel version in the following format:

      Linux 5.15.0-46-generic #44~20.04.5-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jun 24 13:27:29 UTC 2022 x86_64

    2. Confirm that your kernel version matches the system requirements, as listed in Supported operating systems.

Additional package repositories#

On some distributions the ROCm packages depend on packages outside the default package repositories. These extra repositories need to be enabled before installation. Follow the instructions below based on your distributions.

All packages are available in the default Ubuntu repositories, therefore no additional repositories need to be added.

  1. Add the EPEL repository.

    wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

    wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm

  2. Enable the CodeReady Linux Builder (CRB) repository.

    In order to enable CRB, you may need to install dnf-plugin-config-manager first.

    sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-config-manager

    sudo crb enable

Add the Perl language repository.

Note

Mar 25, 2024: We currently need to install the Perl module from SLES 15 SP5 as a workaround. The module was removed for SLES 15 SP4.

zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/perl/15.5/devel:languages:perl.repo

zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/perl/15.5/devel:languages:perl.repo

Kernel headers and development packages#

The driver package uses DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) to build the amdgpu-dkms module (driver) for the installed kernels. This requires the Linux kernel headers and modules to be installed for each. Usually these are automatically installed with the kernel, but if you have multiple kernel versions or you have downloaded the kernel images and not the kernel meta-packages then they must be manually installed.

To install for the currently active kernel run the command corresponding to your distribution.

sudo apt install "linux-headers-$(uname -r)" "linux-modules-extra-$(uname -r)"

sudo yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel

sudo zypper install kernel-default-devel

Setting permissions for groups#

This section provides steps to add any current user to a video group to access GPU resources. Use of the video group is recommended for all ROCm-supported operating systems.

  1. To check the groups in your system, issue the following command:

    groups

  2. Add yourself to the render and video group using the command:

    sudo usermod -a -G render,video $LOGNAME

To add all future users to the video and render groups by default, run the following commands:

echo 'ADD_EXTRA_GROUPS=1' | sudo tee -a /etc/adduser.conf
echo 'EXTRA_GROUPS=video' | sudo tee -a /etc/adduser.conf
echo 'EXTRA_GROUPS=render' | sudo tee -a /etc/adduser.conf