Hello,
I've been working with Étienne Mollier and others on the Debian AI team
to enable ROCm in Debian. I believe it would now be possible to build
Blender with HIP support for AMD GPUs using the HIP package in Debian
Unstable. The Debian HIP package still has a few rough edges that need
cleaning up, but is fully functional. The rocRAND package [1] is an
example of a library that is built using HIP.
The CMake options to enable AMD HIP support in Blender [2] are:
-DWITH_CYCLES_HIP_BINARIES=ON
-DCYCLES_HIP_BINARIES_ARCH=gfx1030
There are a few environment variables that are (temporarily) required to
compile HIP code using the Debian package. Étienne and I are working
towards eliminating the need for them [3], but they're required for the
moment:
export HIP_CLANG_PATH=/usr/bin
export DEVICE_LIB_PATH=/usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/amdgcn/bitcode
export ROCM_PATH=/usr
You will also need to add a few packages to the Build-Depends:
hipcc
libamd-comgr-dev
libhsa-runtime-dev
rocminfo
I'm not sure what tests there are for GPU functionality in Blender, but
my understanding is that the Debian build and test system is not really
set up to handle tests that require GPUs anyway. Christian Kastner has
expressed interest in tackling that problem, though it sounds like a big
job. HIP support would therefore need to be tested manually for the
moment. If you don't have compatible hardware to test with, I believe
there is going to be a porterbox available.
I'd be happy to answer any questions that folks may have about enabling
HIP support in Blender (or other libraries and applications). I'm an AMD
GPU libraries engineer and have been writing code in HIP for the past
few years. My real job is the development of the ROCm mathlibs, but I'm
a fan of both Blender and Debian and I like to help where I can. ROCm
has historically been tricky to install and use, so I've made it a bit
of a personal mission to try to facilitate its packaging and distribution.
I suppose I should probably file a bug on the blender package for this,
but I figured this topic was probably broad enough to be of general
interest for the mailing list. I'm still not very familiar with Debian
etiquette, so please feel free to correct me if I make any mistakes. I'm
still learning about the way you folks work.
Sincerely,
Cordell Bloor
[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team/rocrand
[2]: gfx1030 is the ISA for Navi 21. You may want to expand that
architecture list for the final package, but the initial building and
testing of the package will be faster with a single architecture.
[3]: https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team/rocm-hipamd/-/merge_requests/1
