Canonical to distribute AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in Ubuntu

Canonical is pleased to announce an expanded collaboration with AMD to package and maintain AMD ROCm™ software directly in Ubuntu. AMD ROCm is an open software ecosystem to enable hardware-accelerated AI/ML and HPC workloads on AMD Instinct™ and AMD Radeon™ GPUs, simplifying the deployment of AI infrastructure with long-term support from Canonical.

Canonical has formed a dedicated team of engineers to package the AMD ROCm software libraries to streamline installation, support and long-term maintenance on Ubuntu. Canonical will also submit these packages for consideration in Debian.

This work will simplify the delivery of AMD AI solutions in data centers, workstations, laptops, Windows Subsystem for Linux and edge environments. AMD ROCm software will be available as a dependency for any Debian package, snap or Docker image (OCI) build. Performance fixes and security fixes will be automatically available for production systems.

This collaboration aims to make AMD ROCm software available in Ubuntu starting with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, with updates available in each subsequent Ubuntu release.

AMD ROCm Software: A Commitment to Open Source

Canonical works with silicon industry leaders to include the software libraries and drivers that accelerate applications on their silicon directly into Ubuntu. Comprehensive support for the latest silicon dramatically accelerates developer adoption and production deployments.

For AMD, the software that enables hardware-accelerated AI processing is called ROCm. It is an open software platform that includes runtimes, compilers, libraries, core components and drivers that together accelerate industry standard frameworks such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, Jax and more on supported AMD GPUs and APUs.

“AMD ROCm software enables open, high-performance acceleration for AI and HPC on AMD hardware. Working with Canonical to package AMD ROCm for Ubuntu makes it easier for developers and enterprises to deploy AMD solutions on supported systems,” said Andrej Zdravkovic, Senior Vice President, GPU Technologies and Engineering Software and Chief Software Officer at AMD.

Packaging AMD ROCm in Ubuntu underscores AMD’s strong commitment to developer experience and enterprise experience:

• Simpler installation with ‘apt install rocm’ or as an automatic dependency for other projects, such as rocama-amd.
• Both stable LTS and fresh ROCm versions will be available every six months, to ensure immediate support for the latest hardware and software.
• Easy security fixes and performance improvements (just “appropriate upgrade”).
• Up to 15 years of support for AMD ROCm in Ubuntu LTS versions under Ubuntu Pro.
• Personal Ubuntu Pro subscriptions are free.

“We are thrilled to work with AMD and the community to package AMD ROCm libraries directly into Ubuntu,” said Cindy Goldberg, SVP of Silicon and Cloud Alliances at Canonical. “This will simplify the use of AMD hardware and software for AI workloads, and enable organizations to meet security and maintenance requirements for production use at scale.”

Improved hardware support

Canonical works closely with hardware manufacturers to test, optimize and certify Ubuntu for their devices, and to integrate the required software drivers and kernel patches to support that hardware. Thanks to this extensive hardware program, Ubuntu works equally well on laptops, workstations, servers and IoT/edge devices, and developers have a seamless path from development to deployment.