AMD GPU missing from btop
Table of Contents
I recently built a new PC for my birthday and I splurged a bit with a new AMD Radeon 7900 XTX GPU. Although I’m not a heavy gamer, I’m working with LLMs more often and I’m interested to do some of this work at home.
btop is my go-to tracker for all kinds of data about my system, including CPU usage, memory usage, disk I/O, and network throughput. It’s a great way to track down bottlenecks and find out why your CPU fan is spinning at max speed. 😜
The problem #
My GPU wasn’t showing up in btop after rebuilding the system. Normally, there’s a bar for the GPU right underneath the CPU usage and it tracks the GPU usage as well as memory usage. Some cards report thermals there, too.
The radeontop tool worked fine and I can see the device in the hardware monitoring subsystem:
> cat /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon1/name
amdgpu
The solution #
I installed plenty of AMD packages, but I missed a critical one: rocm-smi:
> dnf install rocm-smi
> rocm-smi
======================================== ROCm System Management Interface ========================================
================================================== Concise Info ==================================================
Device Node IDs Temp Power Partitions SCLK MCLK Fan Perf PwrCap VRAM% GPU%
(DID, GUID) (Edge) (Avg) (Mem, Compute, ID)
==================================================================================================================
0 1 0x744c, 55924 47.0°C 21.0W N/A, N/A, 0 218Mhz 96Mhz 0% auto 327.0W 11% 10%
==================================================================================================================
============================================== End of ROCm SMI Log ===============================================
That’s the ticket! Now my btop data is complete.
