Nope! Works fine with in-tree somewhat recent kernel. The AMD driver is actually open source, not just a wrapper into a big on device blob like the NVIDIA one. tinygrad also has a driver that doesn't even need the kernel module, just mmapping the PCIe BAR into Python.

No. But you might need a specific version of rocm built for your gpu. These are built on https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock

Right now AI support on AMD is officially only on specific models. But they are working hard to turn this around to have broader support. And making progress.

Vulkan compute is also getting some good press as a local llm platform (at least on the linux side), will be interesting to see which crosses the line to "can ship production quality apps on this" first.