not sure why you added that "[the kernel amdgpu]" bit -- pretty sure that isn't what gp was saying.
the open source kernel driver is the only one in use and sits under both the open source and closed source userland driver stacks.
i'm pretty sure what they're saying is that rocm doesn't support running on the apu in the steam deck at all -- i'm dealing with a similar issue in bringing up a product on a different amd apu that has a beefy enough gpu for my application
If so, that's more promising. The HIP runtime sits on the ROCm Runtime (ROCr), which sits on hsa-kmt (ROCt). I was under the impression that the driver handles pretty much all of the stuff that is hardware-specific.
It's an RDNA2 GPU and AFAIK, all the RDNA2 GPUs can be coerced into working with ROCm (even if they are not 'supported'). Maybe the Steam Deck is an exception. I don't know. I'll give it a spin over the holidays. Win, lose or draw, it sounds like I'll learn something interesting.
I borrowed a friend's Steam Deck and created a Debian userland to check if there were any issues using the hardware for ROCm. As far as I can tell, the only reason ROCm doesn't work on the Steam Deck is that the necessary software has not been packaged for SteamOS yet.
When I check rocminfo, the hardware is reported as gfx1033, which is an identical instruction set to gfx1030, so export HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0 should work perfectly if you're using the AMD binaries. Or you can build from source for gfx1033, but that's probably more painful than necessary.
The one catch is that the Steam Deck is currently using Linux 5.13, which predates a lot of bug fixes. I was noticing bugs while using the upstream kernel when packaging ROCm for Debian until something like Linux 5.19. My test case for the Steam Deck was rocRAND, which passed most of its tests. I would expect the rest to pass with a newer kernel, though I haven't verified that.
tl;dr: ROCm is not packaged for easy installation on all the platforms you might want to use it on, but it appears that the hardware works and the software exists.
the open source kernel driver is the only one in use and sits under both the open source and closed source userland driver stacks.
i'm pretty sure what they're saying is that rocm doesn't support running on the apu in the steam deck at all -- i'm dealing with a similar issue in bringing up a product on a different amd apu that has a beefy enough gpu for my application