FreeBSD Intern Working On Porting AMD ROCm To The BSD World

An intern with the FreeBSD Foundation is working on porting AMD's ROCm compute stack to run on this popular BSD environment.

While FreeBSD employs the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver ported over from the Linux kernel and continues to sync up with newer Linux kernel versions for its DRM graphics/display driver support, FreeBSD to date hasn't seen any ROCm compute support. AMD directly hasn't done much traditionally with the BSDs for their graphics driver support -- far different from NVIDIA who has long provided FreeBSD driver packages, albeit even on the NVIDIA driver side they do not officially support CUDA on FreeBSD. But there are workarounds for getting CUDA on FreeBSD such as with Linux emulation and Podman containers.

At the recent FreeBSD Developer Summit, they highlighted the work done by the FreeBSD Foundation Interns with Sourojeet Adhikari pursuing a port of AMD's ROCm compute stack. The goal is for getting at least simple vector addition working with ROCm on FreeBSD.

It would be great to get the complete ROCm/HIP and OpenCL stack working on FreeBSD, but that is likely far out of reach for a single internship period.

Sourojeet has been sharing some posts outlining his work on bringing AMD ROCm to FreeBSD via this directory with the different ROCmFreeBSD_* HTML pages. He continues making progress on compiling the different ROCm open-source components and getting the changes working on FreeBSD. It will be interesting to see how far this work goes for AMD ROCm on FreeBSD and if eventually it could be a better option for GPU compute on FreeBSD than the also unofficial CUDA support. Once getting ROCm on FreeBSD, from there it will be easier to bring AMD ROCm to the other BSDs too.