Canonical announced that after enabling AMD ROCm in the archives Ubuntu 26.04 LTS it plans to supply newer versions of ROCm via the Stable Release Updates. This means that AMD's computing stack for AI/ML and HPC will be updated as part of regular stable updates of Ubuntu, without having to wait for the next distribution release. The announcement was published on June 3, 2026, on the Ubuntu blog.
ROCm is an open-source software stack from AMD for accelerating computations on GPUs, APUs, and CPUs, used in machine learning tasks, local inference, and high-performance computing. In Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, ROCm is already available from the default repositories: the full set of libraries can be installed with the command sudo apt install rocm, while the development set can be installed with sudo apt install rocm-dev. After installation, updates and security patches should come through the regular apt upgrade.
The first version included in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS was ROCm 7.1.0. Canonical explains that including a large set of new packages in the Ubuntu archive took time, and 7.1.0 was up-to-date at the time packaging started. Meanwhile, upstream has already progressed: according to AMD, the ROCm 7.2 series began to be released in January 2026, and the version 7.2.4 was published on May 29, 2026.
In the near future, Canonical is working on packaging ROCm 7.2 and expanding the tested hardware set. The company emphasizes that it does not want to jump immediately to the branches 7.13+, as it is necessary to debug the ROCm update "on the spot" first and ensure that the transition does not break already installed applications. Canonical is particularly cautious about ABI compatibility: even minor updates in the rapidly evolving AI stack can sometimes bring incompatible changes.
Separately, the transition to ROCm 7.13+ and the future ROCm 8, also known as "The Rock". According to Canonical, significant restructuring of libraries is expected in these branches, so it has not yet been decided how far updates can be pushed within the already released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS without risk to users.
For AMD GPU users, this is an important change: ROCm in Ubuntu is no longer a separate manual installation through AMD's script and becomes a standard part of the system. Applications will be able to pull the necessary ROCm libraries as dependencies, containers, and snap/deb packages will rely on system packages, while performance and security fixes will be delivered through the standard Ubuntu update infrastructure. Canonical announced this back in December 2025. announced a collaboration with AMD and a dedicated team of engineers to package and support ROCm in Ubuntu, as well as their intention to transfer the relevant work to Debian.
Source: linux.org.ru
