Hacker News Reader

There actually isn't any locking involved. I can take a new, officially unsupported version of ROCm and just use it with my 7900 XT despite my card not being officially supported and it works. It's just that AMD doesn't feel that they need to invest the resources to run their test suite against my card and bless it as officially supported. And maybe if I was doing something other than running PyTorch I'd run into bugs. But it's just laziness, not malice.

View on HN

I used to be able to run ROCm on my officially unsupported 7840U. Bought the laptop assuming it would continue to work.

Then in a random Linux kernel update they changed the GPU driver. Trying to run ROCm now hard-crashed the GPU requiring a restart. People in the community figured out which patch introduced the problem, but years later... Still no fix or revert. You know, because it's officially unsupported.

So "Just use HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION" is not a solution. You may buy hardware based on that today, and be left holding the bag tomorrow.

This is a very unprofessional attitude. There is no space for laziness in business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com