I am going to buy a new graphics card and can’t choose between Nvidia and AMD. I know that Nvidia has bad reputation in Linux community but how really it works? And I heard recently their drivers got better. What can you recommend?

P. S. I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)

  • Domi
    4•4 months ago

    I’m curious. Say you are getting a new computer, put Debian on, want to run e.g. DeepSeek via ollama via a container (e.g. Docker or podman) and also play, how easy or difficult is it?

    On the host system, you don’t need to do anything. AMDGPU and Mesa are included on most distros.

    For LLMs you can go the easy route and just install the Alpaca flatpak and the AMD addon. It will work out of the box and uses ollama in the background.

    If you need a Docker container for it: AMD provides the handy rocm/dev-ubuntu-${UBUNTU_VERSION}:${ROCM_VERSION}-complete images. They contain all the required ROCm dependencies and runtimes and you can just install your stuff ontop of it.

    As for GPU passthrough, all you need to do is add a device link for /dev/kfd and /dev/dri and you are set. For example, in a docker-compose.yml you just add this:

        devices:
      - /dev/kfd:/dev/kfd
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri

    For example, this is the entire Dockerfile needed to build ComfyUI from scratch with ROCm. The user/group commands are only needed to get the container groups to align with my Fedora host system.

    spoiler 
    ARG UBUNTU_VERSION=24.04
ARG ROCM_VERSION=6.3
ARG BASE_ROCM_DEV_CONTAINER=rocm/dev-ubuntu-${UBUNTU_VERSION}:${ROCM_VERSION}-complete

# For 6000 series
#ARG ROCM_DOCKER_ARCH=gfx1030
# For 7000 series
ARG ROCM_DOCKER_ARCH=gfx1100

FROM ${BASE_ROCM_DEV_CONTAINER}

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y git python-is-python3 && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
RUN pip install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/nightly/rocm6.3 --break-system-packages

# Change group IDs to match Fedora
RUN groupmod -g 1337 irc && groupmod -g 105 render && groupmod -g 39 video

# Rename user on newer 24.04 release and add to video/render group
RUN usermod -l ai ubuntu && \
    usermod -d /home/ai -m ai && \
    usermod -a -G video ai && \
    usermod -a -G render ai

USER ai
WORKDIR /app

ENV PATH="/home/ai/.local/bin:${PATH}"

RUN git clone https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI .
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt --break-system-packages

COPY start.sh /start.sh
CMD /start.sh