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AMD GPU missing from btop

·248 words·2 mins·
Wooden bench on a patio with a view of mountains in the background
Cem Sagisman via Unsplash
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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. 😜

btop.png
Screenshot of btop running on my system

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.

btop-magnified.png
btop showing my GPU stats