Canonical announced last year that in collaboration with AMD they would be bringing the ROCm software libraries into the Ubuntu archive for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS . The plan has been to ship AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in the Ubuntu archive so it would be as easy as sudo apt install rocm for getting started with AMD's open-source GPU compute stack. With today being the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release day, I decided to revisit the topic.

Last month when checking in on the ROCm packaging for Ubuntu 26.04, sudo apt install rocm wasn't working with no "rocm" meta package and other ROCm libraries missing.

Today when trying sudo apt install rocm , it worked! Quick and easy to install ROCm on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS without having to go through AMD's installation steps with their unofficial package archive and the likes.

Great to see it achieved in time for the Ubuntu 26.04 launch day. But disappointing was that for launch day, the packages aren't even up-to-date. At least for all the ROCm libraries I checked, they were still on ROCM 7.1... ROCm 7.1 released last October . ROCm 7.2 released in January , ROCm 7.2.1 in March , and ROCm 7.2.2 earlier this month .

To see the six month old ROCm 7.1 shipped by the brand new Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is disappointing and doesn't bode confidence that these ROCm packages will be rigorously updated/maintained. Especially with the newer ROCm 7.2.x releases improving hardware support and other improvements. Especially with the rate of improvements to ROCm recently, it's unfortunate to see ROCm 7.1 shipped in the Ubuntu 26.04 archive.

So at least for now I'd recommend AMD Radeon/Instinct users of Ubuntu Linux continue using the official AMD Linux install instructions for keeping up with the newer ROCm improvements.