The Debian project announced on Thursday that AMD has got on-board for being a platinum sponsor of their upcoming DebConf25 developer conference happening in July in Brest, France.
AMD is a top-tier sponsor for next month’s annual Debian Developer Conference in France. Given the Debian.org announcement, AMD’s emphasis appears to be on promoting ROCm to Debian developers:
“We are pleased to announce that AMD has committed to sponsor DebConf25 as a Platinum Sponsor.
The AMD ROCm platform includes programming models, tools, compilers, libraries, and runtimes for AI and HPC solution development on AMD GPUs. Debian is an officially supported platform for AMD ROCm and a growing number of components are now included directly in the Debian distribution.”
There are some ROCm components currently included within Debian indeed albeit with the Debian updates policy they quickly become out-of-date for stable distribution releases. For Debian Testing users at least is a more convincing story for using the distribution-packaged ROCm for staying closer to the latest upstream. With Debian not having a convenient third-party repository system like Fedora COPR and Ubuntu PPAs, it’s less appealing as well.
Back at Computex AMD announced they are working to simplify ROCm with the in-box Linux distribution support for Red Hat EPEL, Ubuntu, and openSUSE. Debian wasn’t mentioned there besides, yes, Ubuntu being a downstream of Debian.
I’m also not aware of any of the large hyperscalers or public cloud providers really pushing Debian for ROCm/Instinct GPU compute compared to the other enterprise Linux distributions. The ROCm OS matrix does note Debian 12 support but only for Instinct MI300X hardware and in a single-node configuration.
In any event, interesting to see AMD making more in-roads with different Linux distributions and beginning to sponsor more open-source events.
Those wanting to learn more about the upcoming DebConf25 via DebConf.org.
