If you are interested in open source runtimes, tinygrad has them in Python for both AMD and NVIDIA, speaking directly to the kernel through ioctls and poking the command queues.
https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/tinygrad/ru...
https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/blob/master/tinygrad/ru...
(I want a reference implementation of run-simple-stuff which doesn't fall over because of bugs in libhsa so that I know whatever bug I'm looking at is in my compiler / the hardware / the firmware)
The HSA parsing MEC firmware running on the GPUs is riddled with bugs, fortunately you can bypass 90% of it using PM4, which is pretty much direct sets of the GPU registers. That's what tinygrad does.
AMD's software is a really sad state. They don't have consumer GPUs in CI, they have no fuzz testing, and instead of root causing bugs they seem to just twiddle things until the application works.
Between our PM4 backend and disabling CWSR, our AMD GPUs are now pretty stable.
There is a lot one cannot wisely say about the political structures which give rise to the behaviour of the rocm toolchain. Some of the implementation choices reified in the code are far divorced from what I consider reasonable, but one does not take a hatchet to other people's work.
This makes fixing rocm primarily a people oriented problem to which compiler engineers are not necessarily temperamentally suited. I note that a technically inept but politically minded engineer can do extremely widespread damage in a friendly non-toxic collaborative environment.
Cutting the egregiously broken parts of rocm from one's dependency graph is a solid workaround.