Canonical to distribute AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in Ubuntu

Canonical is pleased to announce an expanded collaboration with AMD to package and maintain AMD ROCm™ software directly in Ubuntu. AMD ROCm is an open software ecosystem to enable hardware-accelerated AI/ML and HPC workloads on AMD Instinct™ and AMD Radeon™ GPUs, simplifying the deployment of AI infrastructure with long term support from Canonical.

Canonical has formed a dedicated team of engineers to package the AMD ROCm software libraries to streamline installation, support, and long-term maintenance on Ubuntu. Canonical will also submit these packages for consideration in Debian.

This work will simplify the delivery of AMD AI solutions in data centers, workstations, laptops, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and edge environments. AMD ROCm software will be available as a dependency for any Debian package, snap, or Docker image (OCI) build.  Performance fixes and security patches will automatically be available to production systems.

This collaboration aims to make AMD ROCm software available in Ubuntu starting with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, with updates available in every subsequent Ubuntu release.  

AMD ROCm software: a commitment to open source 

Canonical works with silicon industry leaders to incorporate the software libraries and drivers that accelerate applications on their silicon directly into Ubuntu. Comprehensive support for the latest silicon dramatically accelerates developer adoption and production deployments.

For AMD, the software that enables hardware-accelerated AI processing is called ROCm. It is an open software platform that includes runtimes, compilers, libraries, kernel components, and drivers that together accelerate industry standard frameworks such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, Jax, and more on supported AMD GPUs and APUs. 

“AMD ROCm software enables open, high-performance acceleration for AI and HPC on AMD hardware. Working with Canonical to package AMD ROCm for Ubuntu makes it easier for developers and enterprises to deploy AMD solutions on supported systems,” said Andrej Zdravkovic, Senior Vice President, GPU Technologies and Engineering Software and Chief Software Officer at AMD.     

Packaging AMD ROCm in Ubuntu underscores the strong AMD commitment to developer experience and enterprise experience:

• Simpler installation with ‘apt install rocm’ or as an automatic dependency for other projects, like ollama-amd.
• Both stable LTS and fresh ROCm versions every six months will be available, to ensure immediate support for the latest hardware and software.
• Easy security fixes and performance improvements (just “apt upgrade”).
• Up to 15 years of support for AMD ROCm in Ubuntu LTS versions under Ubuntu Pro. 
• Personal Ubuntu Pro subscriptions are free.

“We are delighted to work alongside AMD and the community to package AMD ROCm libraries directly into Ubuntu,” said Cindy Goldberg, SVP of Silicon and Cloud Alliances at Canonical. “This will simplify the use of AMD hardware and software for AI workloads, and enable organizations to meet security and maintenance requirements for production use at scale.”

Improved hardware support

Canonical works closely with hardware manufactures to test, optimize, and certify Ubuntu for their devices, and to integrate the required software drivers and kernel patches to support that hardware. Thanks to this extensive hardware program, Ubuntu runs equally well on laptops, workstations, servers, and IoT/edge devices, and developers have a seamless path from development through to deployment.

• Learn more about Canonical’s silicon partnerships
• Read about AMD ROCm software