AMD Radeon announced on Twitter/X that it will “soon” open source additional parts of its software suite as well as release more hardware documentation.
@amdradeon account published:
“As community interest grows in ROCm on Radeon, we’ve created a tracker to capture feedback and provide updates.
Coming soon: open source add-ons to our software suite and more hardware documentation.”
Interestingly on the software side, they will be working on making additional parts of their Radeon software suite open source. Their GPU and ROCm software stacks are pretty open as it is now, with the main exception being around the GPU firmware/microcode. There have been recent calls for at least some AMD GPU firmware to be open-sourced, so we’ll see if this open-source is related to that or something else in their software pipeline over time.
It is also interesting that they plan to release more hardware documentation. Aside from the ISA documentation, the Radeon hardware documentation is nowhere near what it was a decade or more ago… AMD published a lot of programming docs back in the early days of their open source efforts, but then instead focused on investing in engineering/ legal resources in obtaining the code of the open source Linux graphics driver. Cleaning up and legally reviewing their hardware documentation to make it open source was a significant time commitment and all the resources involved that they instead focused more on making sure their open-source Linux driver was in good shape. We’ll see what “more hardware documentation” brings with it.
It’s also a bit odd that in regards to tracking to capture feedback/updates around ROCm on Radeon, they’ve linked to nod-ai/fuzzyHSA on GitHub. This seems to be on the fuzzing library from Nod.ai, which AMD bought Nod.ai last year. Since there are already ROCm GitHub repositories and the like, why they’re using the fuzzyHSA repository as an issue tracker seems pretty strange unless it’s some sort of linking bug.
Anyway, I’m definitely excited to see more open-source and hardware documentation, let’s see what it is…