Upgrading ROCm from 5.7.1 to 6.4.3

Published on 2025-09-17
rocmamdpytorchtriton
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Motivation #

The other day, I was trying to run RT-DETR on my AMD GPU (7900XTX) but hit this error:

AttributeError: module 'triton' has no attribute 'language'

Newer PyTorch versions use TorchDynamo, which expects modern Triton APIs. Triton is already integrated into PyTorch for CUDA GPUs, but you need to install a separate ROCm implementation (pytorch-triton-rocm). I initially used PyTorch 2.4.1+rocm6.0 and pytorch-triton-rocm 3.0.0, but encountered the above error. After some research with Claude Code, I realized this version was a bit old (July 2024) and the current main branch does have the triton.language module.

PyTorch ROCm builds are locked to their specific pytorch-triton-rocm versions, so to upgrade triton I needed to upgrade PyTorch versions, and I decided to upgrade ROCm too.

Checking the current versions #

cat /opt/rocm/.info/version or ls /opt/rocm* should give you the ROCm version you installed. You can also check at the package level with dpkg -l | grep rocm or apt list --installed | grep rocm if you installed it via package manager. Example output:

$ dpkg -l | grep rocm
ii  rocm-cmake5.7.1                                             0.10.0.50701-98~22.04                               amd64        rocm-cmake built using CMake
ii  rocm-core                                                   6.0.0.60000-91~22.04                                amd64        Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) Runtime software stack
ii  rocm-core5.7.1                                              5.7.1.50701-98~22.04                                amd64        Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) Runtime software stack
ii  rocm-device-libs5.7.1                                       1.0.0.50701-98~22.04                                amd64 
...

You can see that ROCm 5.7.1 packages are installed here.

Uninstalling ROCm 5.7.1 #

Looking at the official uninstall instructions, I noticed that the installation package for ROCm 5.7.1 is rocm-hip-sdk, but for ROCm 6.4.3 it's just rocm, so I uninstalled the old ROCm to be safe. The uninstallation step is the same for 6.0.0 (ref). I recommend running both sudo apt autoremove <package-name> and sudo apt autoremove <package-name with release version> to make sure you uninstall old packages completely:

sudo apt autoremove rocm-hip-sdk5.7.1
sudo apt autoremove rocm-core5.7.1
sudo apt autoremove rocm-hip-sdk
sudo apt autoremove rocm-core

My system only had these two packages though:

sudo apt autoremove rocm-hip-sdk5.7.1
sudo apt autoremove rocm-core

After uninstallation, verify that no ROCm packages are installed:

$ apt list --installed | grep rocm
$ ls /opt/rocm*

Finally, remove the apt ROCm repository:

$ sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list

For the kernel driver, 6.4.3 still uses the same package amdgpu-dkms, so I didn't have to uninstall it.

Installing ROCm 6.4.3 #

Now we can just follow the ROCm 6.4.3 documentation to install it.

Prerequisites #

Read the official doc here. I don't use Secure Boot on this computer, and I just configured GPU access permissions by adding myself to the render and video groups:

sudo usermod -a -G render,video $LOGNAME

Installation #

Note that the new ROCm package is 23+GB.

Download and convert the package signing key:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

sudo mkdir --parents --mode=0755 /etc/apt/keyrings

wget https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/rocm.gpg.key -O - | \
    gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/rocm.gpg > /dev/null

Register packages:

echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/rocm.gpg] https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/6.4.3 jammy main" \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list
echo -e 'Package: *\nPin: release o=repo.radeon.com\nPin-Priority: 600' \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/rocm-pin-600
sudo apt update

Install the ROCm package:

$ sudo apt install rocm
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  amd-smi-lib comgr composablekernel-dev gdal-data half hip-dev hip-doc hip-runtime-amd hip-samples hipblas hipblas-common-dev hipblas-dev hipblaslt
...
rocthrust-dev roctracer roctracer-dev rocwmma-dev rpp rpp-dev unixodbc-common valgrind
0 upgraded, 183 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
Need to get 3,992 MB of archives.
After this operation, 23.8 GB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Post-installation setup #

Make sure to follow the post-installation instructions, especially the system linker step:

sudo tee --append /etc/ld.so.conf.d/rocm.conf <<EOF
/opt/rocm/lib
/opt/rocm/lib64
EOF
sudo ldconfig

After that, you also need to configure paths:

sudo update-alternatives --display rocm
rocm - auto mode
  link best version is /opt/rocm-6.4.3
  link currently points to /opt/rocm-6.4.3
  link rocm is /opt/rocm
/opt/rocm-6.4.3 - priority 649626295
# -> shows update-alternatives is already working and has automatically configured ROCm 6.4.3 as the default version.

# Claude suggested this rather than the `export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/rocm-6.4.3/lib`
echo 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/rocm/lib' >> ~/.bashrc

Now, confirm that the new ROCm has been installed:

$ cat /opt/rocm/.info/version
6.4.3-128

Verify you can run rocminfo and rocm-smi commands. After a reboot, you should be able to install newer PyTorch and triton versions!

What I installed for RT-DETR #

For the record, after this upgrade I was able to install these newer torch packages for running RT-DETR GPU inference and resolve the previous AttributeError:

# Working setup
torch = "2.6.0+rocm6.4.3"
torchvision = "0.21.0+rocm6.4.3"
torchaudio = "2.6.0+rocm6.4.3"
pytorch-triton-rocm = "3.2.0+rocm6.4.3"  # <- Now has triton.language
transformers = "4.55.4"

Here's an example detection result with the RT-DETR Large model:

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