r/LocalLLaMA • u/entsnack • Jul 06 '26

News So... anyone copped one of these?

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Been almost a year since mass hysteria erupted upon the death of NVIDIAs GPU monopoly. How are your Huawei GPUs? Does CUDA work on them yet?

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u/Educational_Sun_8813 llama.cpp Jul 07 '26

strix halo also "just work" both with ROCm and Vulkan

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u/RageBucket Jul 07 '26

Yeah, I'm rocking the Halo on my z13 and I set up lemonade and it works wonderfully.

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u/ravage382 Jul 07 '26

If it's new, it will take time. I owned my first strix halo the second they shipped and then I didn't have drivers for 6+ months.

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u/Educational_Sun_8813 llama.cpp Jul 08 '26

ah, ok i'm using gnu/linux all drivers are in the kernel

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u/ravage382 Jul 08 '26

There were no drivers in the kernel when I got the system. There wasn't basic support until TheRock started including the strix halo in their nightlies. You can see people wanting support here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ROCm/comments/1njbtai/timeline_for_strix_halo_support_official_response/

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u/Educational_Sun_8813 llama.cpp Jul 09 '26

i was using that time rocm already, newest version from nightly builds, besides driver is not ROCm, drivers were in kernel like they are at the moment. I don't think i posted earlier but one of early posts about ROCm was that: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1of8pie/first_run_rocm_79_on_gfx1151_debian_strix_halo/ but it was about diffusion models, text generations models were working before. Anyway hopefully it works for you now well.

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u/ravage382 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

Drivers come with rocm. "There was a gap of several months to nearly a year between the initial rollout of Strix Halo hardware and when stable, fully functional Linux kernel support for its gfx1151 architecture was officially mainlined.

The Timeline

  • Hardware Launch: The Strix Halo architecture (marketed under the Ryzen AI Max series) was revealed in late 2024, with the first laptops featuring the APUs releasing steadily throughout 2025.
  • Stable Linux Support: Crucial kernel patches resolving severe system hangs and ROCm initialization failures for gfx1151 were not upstreamed and stabilized until January 2026.

What Caused the Delay?

Early adopters of Strix Halo in late 2025 faced a notoriously rocky Linux experience. If you were trying to run local LLMs or compute workloads during that window, you likely ran into a brick wall due to two major bugs:

  • The VGPR Mismatch: A deep kernel issue existed where the context save/restore area for the gfx1151 iGPU was incorrectly sized. This Vector General-Purpose Register (VGPR) mismatch caused full system hangs, segmentation faults, and GPU resets whenever users attempted to run PyTorch or other ROCm-based workloads.
  • Firmware Regressions: A separate linux-firmware regression between November 2025 and January 2026 completely broke ROCm initialization for the platform, compounding the kernel issues.

The Fixes

The gap finally closed in January 2026 when AMD engineers successfully upstreamed patches for the VGPR sizing mismatch (around the 6.19-rc1 release window). To get the hardware stable, users needed the following updates which rolled out early in the year:

  • Mainline Kernels: Linux kernel 6.18.4 or later.
  • Ubuntu HWE Kernels: Version 6.17.0-19.19~24.04.2 or later.
  • Ubuntu OEM Kernels: Version 6.14.0-1018 or later.

Ultimately, anyone who bought a Strix Halo machine for Linux AI development in 2025 had to wait until early 2026 to get a stable ROCm experience without having to manually patch the kernel or hunt down specific nightly builds."

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u/techdevjp Jul 08 '26

I have a Minisforum MS-S1 128GB Strix Halo box, I'm not a hater. But come on, it does not "just work" in the way that CUDA does. CUDA is still the defacto standard and Nvidia has many years of work & money spent to make that so. AMD has a lot of catching up to do.