TheRock

TheRock (The HIP Environment and ROCm Kit) is a lightweight open source build platform for HIP and ROCm. The project is currently in an early preview state but is under active development and welcomes contributors. Come try us out! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more info.

Features

TheRock includes:

• Nightly releases of ROCm and PyTorch
• A CMake super-project for HIP and ROCm source builds
• Support for building PyTorch with ROCm from source
• JAX support and other external project builds are in the works!
• Operating system support including multiple Linux distributions and native Windows
• Tools for developing individual ROCm components
• Comprehensive CI/CD pipelines for building, testing, and releasing supported components

Installing from releases

Important

See the Releases Page for instructions on how to install prebuilt ROCm and PyTorch packages.

Nightly release status

Packages and Python wheels:

Platform	Prebuilt tarballs and ROCm Python packages	PyTorch Python packages
Linux
Windows

Building from source

We keep the following instructions for recent, commonly used operating system versions. Most build failures are due to minor operating system differences in dependencies and project setup. Refer to the Environment Setup Guide for contributed instructions and configurations for alternatives.

Tip

While building from source offers the greatest flexibility, installing from releases in supported configurations is often faster and easier.

Important

Frequent setup and building problems and their solutions can be found in section Common Issues.

Setup - Ubuntu (24.04)

Tip

dvc is used for version control of pre-compiled MIOpen kernels. dvc is not a hard requirement, but it does reduce compile time. snap install --classic dvc can be used to install on Ubuntu. Visit the DVC website for other installation methods.

# Install Ubuntu dependencies
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gfortran git git-lfs ninja-build cmake g++ pkg-config xxd patchelf automake libtool python3-venv python3-dev libegl1-mesa-dev

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock.git
cd TheRock

# Init python virtual environment and install python dependencies
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Download submodules and apply patches
python3 ./build_tools/fetch_sources.py

Setup - Windows 11 (VS 2022)

If the build system is a non-English system. Make sure to switch to utf-8.

chcp 65001

# Install dependencies following the Windows support guide

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock.git
cd TheRock

# Init python virtual environment and install python dependencies
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\Activate.bat
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Download submodules and apply patches
# Note that dvc is used for pulling large files
python ./build_tools/fetch_sources.py

Build configuration

The build can be customized through cmake feature flags.

Required configuration flags

-DTHEROCK_AMDGPU_FAMILIES=

or

-DTHEROCK_AMDGPU_TARGETS=

Optional configuration flags

By default, the project builds everything available. The following group flags enable/disable selected subsets:

Group flag	Description
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_ALL=OFF	Disables all optional components
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_CORE=OFF	Disables all core components
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_COMM_LIBS=OFF	Disables all communication libraries
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_MATH_LIBS=OFF	Disables all math libraries
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_ML_LIBS=OFF	Disables all ML libraries
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_PROFILER=OFF	Disables profilers

Individual features can be controlled separately (typically in combination with -DTHEROCK_ENABLE_ALL=OFF or -DTHEROCK_RESET_FEATURES=ON to force a minimal build):

Component flag	Description
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_COMPILER=ON	Enables the GPU+host compiler toolchain
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_HIPIFY=ON	Enables the hipify tool
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_CORE_RUNTIME=ON	Enables the core runtime components and tools
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_HIP_RUNTIME=ON	Enables the HIP runtime components
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_ROCPROFV3=ON	Enables rocprofv3
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_RCCL=ON	Enables RCCL
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_PRIM=ON	Enables the PRIM library
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_BLAS=ON	Enables the BLAS libraries
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_RAND=ON	Enables the RAND libraries
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_SOLVER=ON	Enables the SOLVER libraries
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_SPARSE=ON	Enables the SPARSE libraries
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_MIOPEN=ON	Enables MIOpen

Tip

Enabling any features will implicitly enable their minimum dependencies. Some libraries (like MIOpen) have a number of optional dependencies, which must be enabled manually if enabling/disabling individual features.

Tip

A report of enabled/disabled features and flags will be printed on every CMake configure.

By default, components are built from the sources fetched via the submodules. For some components, external sources can be used instead.

External source settings	Description
-DTHEROCK_USE_EXTERNAL_COMPOSABLE_KERNEL=OFF	Use external composable-kernel source location
-DTHEROCK_USE_EXTERNAL_RCCL=OFF	Use external rccl source location
-DTHEROCK_USE_EXTERNAL_RCCL_TESTS=OFF	Use external rccl-tests source location
-DTHEROCK_COMPOSABLE_KERNEL_SOURCE_DIR=<PATH>	Path to composable-kernel sources
-DTHEROCK_RCCL_SOURCE_DIR=<PATH>	Path to rccl sources
-DTHEROCK_RCCL_TESTS_SOURCE_DIR=<PATH>	Path to rccl-tests sources

Further flags allow to build components with specific features enabled.

Other flags	Description
-DTHEROCK_ENABLE_MPI=OFF	Enables building components with Message Passing Interface (MPI) support

Note

Building components with MPI support, currently requires MPI to be pre-installed until issue #1284 is resolved.

CMake build usage

For workflows that demand frequent rebuilds, it is recommended to build it with ccache enabled to speed up the build. See instructions in the next section for Linux and Windows.

Otherwise, ROCm/HIP can be configured and build with just the following commands:

cmake -B build -GNinja . -DTHEROCK_AMDGPU_FAMILIES=gfx110X-dgpu
cmake --build build

CCache usage on Linux

To build with the ccache compiler cache:

• You must have a recent ccache (>= 4.11 at the time of writing) that supports proper caching with the --offload-compress option used for compressing AMDGPU device code.
• export CCACHE_SLOPPINESS=include_file_ctime to support hard-linking
• Proper setup of the compiler_check directive to do safe caching in the presence of compiler bootstrapping
• Set the C/CXX compiler launcher options to cmake appropriately. Since these options are very fiddly and prone to change over time, we recommend using the ./build_tools/setup_ccache.py script to create a .ccache directory in the repository root with hard coded configuration suitable for the project.

Example:

# Any shell used to build must eval setup_ccache.py to set environment
# variables.
eval "$(./build_tools/setup_ccache.py)"
cmake -B build -GNinja -DTHEROCK_AMDGPU_FAMILIES=gfx110X-dgpu \
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=ccache \
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=ccache \
.

cmake --build build

CCache usage on Windows

We are still investigating the exact proper options for ccache on Windows and do not currently recommend that end users enable it.

Running tests

Project-wide testing can be controlled with the standard CMake -DBUILD_TESTING=ON|OFF flag. This gates both setup of build tests and compilation of installed testing artifacts.

Tests of the integrity of the build are enabled by default and can be run with ctest:

ctest --test-dir build

Testing functionality on an actual GPU is in progress and will be documented separately.

Development manuals

• Contribution Guidelines: Documentation for the process of contributing to this project including a quick pointer to its governance.
• Development Guide: Documentation on how to use TheRock as a daily driver for developing any of its contained ROCm components (i.e. vs interacting with each component build individually).
• Build System: More detailed information about TheRock’s build system relevant to people looking to extend TheRock, add components, etc.
• Environment Setup Guide: Comprehensive guide for setting up a build environment, known workarounds, and other operating specific information.
• Git Chores: Procedures for managing the codebase, specifically focused on version control, upstream/downstream, etc.
• Dependencies: Further specifications on ROCm-wide standards for depending on various components.
• Build Containers: Further information about containers used for building TheRock on CI.
• Build Artifacts: Documentation about the outputs of the build system.
• Releases Page: Documentation for how to leverage our build artifacts.
• Roadmap for Support: Documentation for our prioritized roadmap to support AMD GPUs.