amd-smi-wsl 0.2.0

Drop-in amdsmi replacement for WSL2 / Windows (HIP + Windows interop backed).

amd-smi-wsl

A drop-in replacement for the amdsmi Python package that works inside WSL2 / Windows, where the native AMD SMI library cannot run.

This is a property of the WSL2 GPU stack rather than of any single card, so it applies broadly to AMD GPUs used with ROCm under WSL2 — across RDNA generations (e.g. RDNA3 / RDNA3.5 / RDNA4 desktop Radeon and Radeon PRO cards, as well as Ryzen AI APUs). The data sources it builds on (the HIP runtime and Windows interop) are GPU-agnostic; only the per-device details (PCI id, market name, gfx arch) differ from card to card.

import amdsmi            # this package, not the native one
amdsmi.amdsmi_init()
h = amdsmi.amdsmi_get_processor_handles()[0]
print(amdsmi.amdsmi_get_gpu_asic_info(h)["market_name"])

Why

On WSL2 any AMD GPU is exposed through DirectX para-virtualisation (/dev/dxg + dxgkrnl), not the native amdgpu KFD driver. The Linux /dev/kfd device and its sysfs topology simply do not exist, so — regardless of which Radeon / Ryzen GPU you have:

• import amdsmi (native) fails / amdsmi_init() raises, and
• downstream code such as vLLM then fails ROCm platform detection and device-name / topology queries at startup,

even though the HIP runtime itself works perfectly via /dev/dxg.

This package restores the amdsmi import surface and re-implements the queryable subset on top of data sources that do work in WSL2:

Source	Provides
torch.cuda (HIP runtime)	device count, name, GCN arch, total VRAM, compute units, UUID, live mem usage
Windows interop (Get-CimInstance Win32_VideoController)	real PCI device id, subsystem id, revision, driver version/date
Static gfx -> metadata table	marketing name / VRAM type / device id fallbacks

Note on torch re-entrancy. PyTorch's ROCm build resolves its device count through amdsmi itself. Since this package replaces amdsmi, a naive probe would recurse (amdsmi_init -> torch.cuda -> amdsmi_init ...). A thread-local re-entrancy guard breaks that cycle so torch falls back to its native HIP device count. See the v0.2.0 entry in the changelog.

API coverage

The package exposes every public symbol of the upstream binding — all 189 amdsmi_* functions, all 37 AmdSmi* enums, and the full exception hierarchy — so import amdsmi is binary-compatible at the Python level.

• Implemented for real (read-only queries that map cleanly to HIP / Windows data): init / shutdown, processor & socket handle enumeration, asic_info, board_info, vram_info, vram_usage, memory_total, memory_usage, device_uuid, device_bdf, driver_info, gpu_id, subsystem_id/name, revision, vendor_name, topo_get_link_type, topo_get_numa_node_number, lib_version, rocm_version, status_code_to_string, and best-effort activity / clock_info / temp_metric / power_info (when the running torch build exposes them).
• Faithful NOT_SUPPORTED stubs for everything the platform genuinely lacks under WSL2: the entire CPU/HSMP/EPYC surface, performance counters, RAS/ECC, compute/memory partitioning, every set_* mutator, GPU reset, KFD info, XGMI status, and event notification. These raise AmdSmiLibraryException(AMDSMI_STATUS_NOT_SUPPORTED) — exactly what the native library does for unsupported features.

Install

pip install amd-smi-wsl

torch (ROCm build) is expected to already be present in your environment and is therefore not declared as a hard dependency.

Only install this where the real amdsmi cannot be used. In a normal native-Linux ROCm install you should keep the official amdsmi.

Environment variables

• AMDSMI_WSL_DISABLE=1 — make amdsmi_init() raise NOT_SUPPORTED, useful to test a caller's fallback path.

Relationship to vLLM

This package makes the native-amdsmi code paths in vLLM's vllm/platforms/rocm.py and vllm/platforms/__init__.py work unchanged on WSL2, as an alternative to patching vLLM with torch.cuda fallbacks (cf. vLLM PR #37189).

With this package installed, vLLM resolves the canonical device name from its hex-keyed _ROCM_DEVICE_ID_NAME_MAP (because asic_info["device_id"] is returned as a lowercase hex string such as "0x1586"), e.g.:

from vllm.platforms import rocm_platform_plugin
import vllm.platforms.rocm as rocm
rocm_platform_plugin()              # -> 'vllm.platforms.rocm.RocmPlatform'
rocm.RocmPlatform.get_device_name(0)  # -> 'AMD_Radeon_8060S'
rocm._GCN_ARCH                      # -> 'gfx1151'

Verified environment

The mechanism is GPU-agnostic (it only relies on the HIP runtime + Windows interop, which behave the same for any Radeon / Ryzen GPU under WSL2). The numbers below are from one fully validated end-to-end setup — WSL2 + AMD Radeon 8060S (Strix Halo, gfx1151) + ROCm 7.2.4 + PyTorch 2.9.1 — and the device-specific values (name, device_id, gfx arch) will naturally differ on other cards:

Check	Result
import amdsmi + amdsmi_init()	OK (no recursion)
amdsmi_get_gpu_asic_info()["market_name"]	AMD Radeon(TM) 8060S Graphics
amdsmi_get_gpu_asic_info()["device_id"]	0x1586 (hex string)
target_graphics_version	gfx1151
test suite (pytest)	16 passed
vLLM rocm_platform_plugin()	vllm.platforms.rocm.RocmPlatform
vLLM RocmPlatform.get_device_name(0)	AMD_Radeon_8060S
vLLM is_fully_connected([0])	True

Telemetry that the platform does not expose (clock_info, temp_metric, power_info, gpu_activity) raises AMDSMI_STATUS_NOT_SUPPORTED, as expected.

License

MIT. Status constants, enum values and exception classes are derived from the MIT-licensed ROCm/amdsmi project.