Sander van Dragt's Notes

Sander @ November 7 at 3:04 pm

First you are not paying for the product, but you are the product. Some time later it's 'you are paying for the product, but they are subsidising the costs with ads'. Later on it's full price and full of tracking and ads. Instead, buy products that respect the consumer.

Getting AMD ROCm Working on the RX 6750 XT (Ubuntu 22.04)

Sander @ October 24 at 8:17 am

I recently went through the process of setting up AMD’s ROCm stack on a desktop with a Ryzen 9 7900X3D and a Radeon RX 6750 XT (Navi 22). It wasn’t entirely plug-and-play — ROCm still doesn’t officially support RDNA2 consumer GPUs — but it can work with the right tweaks.

Here’s the path I took, what didn’t work at first, and how I fixed it.

Why ROCm?

I wanted to build a local AI Note Taker that recently added linux support, but it did not detect GPU acceleration.

System setup

Hardware:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT (Navi 22 / gfx1031)

OS: Ubuntu 22.04. Kernel: 6.8 (with amdgpu built in).

Installing ROCm

ROCm comes as a set of APT packages via the official AMD repo. The basic runtime stack is easy to install:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install rocm-smi-lib hip-runtime-amd rocminfo hipcc

That gets you:

rocminfo (device enumerator)
hipcc (HIP compiler)
rocm-smi-lib (system management interface)
runtime libraries for HIP and HSA.

Making sure it’s on PATH

ROCm installs into a versioned folder (/opt/rocm-6.4.1). I symlinked it to /opt/rocm for convenience:

sudo ln -sfn /opt/rocm-6.4.1 /opt/rocm
echo 'export PATH=/opt/rocm/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.zshrc
exec zsh -l

Now rocminfo and hipcc are both available globally.

Permissions and groups

ROCm needs access to /dev/kfd and /dev/dri/*. Make sure your user is in the right groups:

sudo usermod -aG render,video $USER

Log out and back in (or reboot). Then check:

ls -l /dev/kfd /dev/dri

You should see group ownership as render or video.

Testing the stack

First test:

rocminfo | head -40

Initially, I saw only the CPU agent — no GPU. This is because the RX 6750 XT (gfx1031) isn’t officially supported by ROCm.

The magic fix: `HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION`

ROCm’s runtime filters out unrecognized GPUs by GFX ID. Navi 22 (gfx1031) isn’t whitelisted. To make ROCm treat it as a known architecture (gfx1030), I added this:

echo 'export HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0' >> ~/.zshrc
exec zsh -l

After restarting the shell:

rocminfo | grep -A20 gfx1030

Now I had a GPU agent:

Name: AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT
Device Type: GPU
Compute Unit: 40
Wavefront Size: 32

Checking with HIP

Quick sanity test:

cat <<'EOF' > hip_info.cpp
#include <hip/hip_runtime.h>
#include <cstdio>
int main(){
  int n=0; hipGetDeviceCount(&n);
  printf("HIP devices: %d\n", n);
  for(int i=0;i<n;++i){
    hipDeviceProp_t p{};
    hipGetDeviceProperties(&p,i);
    printf("[%d] %s arch=%d.%d gcn=%s mem=%zuMB\n",
      i,p.name,p.major,p.minor,p.gcnArchName,(size_t)(p.totalGlobalMem/1024/1024));
  }
}
EOF

hipcc --offload-arch=gfx1030 hip_info.cpp -o hip_info
./hip_info

Output:

HIP devices: 1
[0] AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT arch=10.3 gcn=gfx1030 mem=12272MB

Optional: AMD-SMI CLI

AMD now ships a Python-based CLI for managing GPUs. Install it from the ROCm tree:

sudo apt install amd-smi-lib
python3 -m pip install --user /opt/rocm-6.4.1/share/amd_smi

Then:

amd-smi version
amd-smi

Quick validation kernel

To actually use the GPU:

__global__ void vadd(const float*a,const float*b,float*c,int n){
  int i = blockIdx.x*blockDim.x + threadIdx.x;
  if(i<n) c[i]=a[i]+b[i];
}

Build:

hipcc --offload-arch=gfx1030 vadd.cpp -o vadd
./vadd

You’ll see correct output from the GPU kernel.

Takeaways

The 6750 XT (gfx1031) works fine with ROCm 6.4, but requires HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0.
hipcc now uses --offload-arch instead of --amdgpu-target.
Make sure /opt/rocm/bin and ~/.local/bin are on your PATH.
Add yourself to render and video.
The rest “just works.”

Thing's to try next next

Now that it’s running, next steps I’d explore:

Installing PyTorch ROCm wheels and running a GPU benchmark.
Trying TensorFlow ROCm builds.
Packaging the setup in a Docker container with the override baked in.
Writing a one-liner shell script to automate this setup from scratch.

TL;DR Command Reference

# Install core ROCm stack
sudo apt update
sudo apt install rocm-smi-lib hip-runtime-amd rocminfo hipcc

# Fix the ROCm path
sudo ln -sfn /opt/rocm-6.4.1 /opt/rocm
echo 'export PATH=/opt/rocm/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.zshrc

# Add GPU access permissions
sudo usermod -aG render,video $USER
# Then log out / back in (or reboot)

# Enable Navi 22 GPUs for ROCm (the critical step)
echo 'export HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0' >> ~/.zshrc
exec zsh -l

# Verify installation
rocminfo | grep -A2 gfx1030           # Should show GPU agent
hipcc --version                       # Should print HIP/clang version
amd-smi                               # Should list your Radeon card

# Optional: AMD-SMI Python CLI
sudo apt install amd-smi-lib
python3 -m pip install --user /opt/rocm-6.4.1/share/amd_smi
echo 'export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.zshrc
exec zsh -l

# Test HIP runtime
cat <<'EOF' > hip_info.cpp
#include <hip/hip_runtime.h>
#include <cstdio>
int main(){
  int n=0; hipGetDeviceCount(&n);
  printf("HIP devices: %d\n", n);
  for(int i=0;i<n;++i){
    hipDeviceProp_t p{}; hipGetDeviceProperties(&p,i);
    printf("[%d] %s arch=%d.%d gcn=%s mem=%zuMB\n",
      i,p.name,p.major,p.minor,p.gcnArchName,(size_t)(p.totalGlobalMem/1024/1024));
  }
}
EOF

hipcc --offload-arch=gfx1030 hip_info.cpp -o hip_info
./hip_info
# → should print your RX 6750 XT with ~12 GB memory

ElementaryOS 7 to 8 upgrade notes

Sander @ September 19 at 12:59 pm

Although it's not supported I used this guide to semi automatically upgrade my daily driver.

You'll want to create a restore point with Timeshift, and ideally a system image using CloneZilla, because stuff is likely to break. I also backup my home directory with Back In Time and have a sync app for certain files within that.

I first created two Virtual Machines for eOS7 and eOS8 and then compared the eOS7 system after it was upgraded to 8 with a vanilla eOS8 setup, before I was confident enough to go ahead.

Apt sources compatibility

The main culprit as usual were third-party apt sources. In particular, if you have this hardware, I recommend to remove the AMD GPU drivers completely and reinstall them after the upgrade, to avoid kernel compilation issues.

Applications

I also lost a few applications (HeyNote and Albert), but their preferences were still there so simply reinstalling them made them work again.

Heynote's AppImage would no longer start:
```
./Heynote.AppImage                                                                                     [35483:0919/135315.749882:FATAL:sandbox/linux/suid/client/setuid_sandbox_host.cc:169] The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I'm aborting now. You need to make sure that /tmp/.mount_Heynot9r0j9T/chrome-sandbox is owned by root and has mode 4755
```
I fixed this by installing the HeyNote snap version.

Albert could not be found (not sure why but the executable was no longer on the system) and I installed the OBS version from their website which setup a new apt sources file.

backintime-qt was gone, a simple apt install restored it.

Other issues

My custom keyboard shortcuts are still running but they are no longer visible. I have a bunch migrated over from /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom1-custom7 but they are not showing in the Custom shortcut settings anytime, as these are now stored at /io/elementary/settings-daemon/applications/application-shortcuts. It's possible to dump them by restoring the dconf database to a test-user and then using dconf dump with some parameters.

I use an app called Input Remapper to map my option and command keys (long story) and this stopped working after the upgrade, despite the app saying the mapping is in effect. I'll try and recreate it and see if there's an update for it.

That's it, relatively smooth for an unsupported setup.

#linux #elementary