HatefulSable's Guide to Installing Stable Diffusion WebUI on Ubuntu With an AMD GFX8 GPU

Last updated October 25, 2023.

This document is a start-to-finish guide to setting up Stable Diffusion WebUI on Ubuntu using a ROCm capable AMD GFX8 graphics card. The procedure has been tested on a system with the following specifications:

• Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS
• Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX 580
• 16GB 2133MT/s RAM

If you have a setup similar to this one, this guide should contain all the information you need to get started with WebUI.

For Nvidia graphics cards, see https://rentry.org/sable-sdw-ubuntu-nvidia instead.

Before You Begin

Ensure that you know the difference between system RAM and VRAM. This guide refers to both at various times.

Check that you have a 64-bit CPU. Most computers from the past decade probably meet this requirement, but you may wish to verify this before continuing.

Check that you have a ROCm capable GFX8 GPU. If you are unsure about this, rocminfo (installed later in this guide) can be used to confirm your GPU's architecture and compatibility. For more information, see https://community.amd.com/t5/knowledge-base/amd-rocm-hardware-and-software-support-document/ta-p/489937.

Install Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS, available at https://releases.ubuntu.com/20.04.5/ubuntu-20.04.5-desktop-amd64.iso. You may choose a minimal installation, since only a web browser and basic utilities are required. This guide assumes that you are starting from a fresh installation and have not made any major changes to the operating system or software.

Install ROCm

Install amdgpu-dkms from the AMDGPU 5.4.2 repository.

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wget -qO- https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/rocm.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://repo.radeon.com/amdgpu/5.4.2/ubuntu/ focal main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install libnuma-dev amdgpu-dkms

Reboot the system. You must install the ROCm software stack from the ROCm 5.2 repository, since this is the version that PyTorch will be expecting.

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echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/5.2/ ubuntu main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install libopenblas-base libopenmpi3 miopen-hip rccl rocm-dkms rocm-libs
sudo usermod -aG render,video $LOGNAME
echo "export PATH=$PATH:/opt/rocm/bin:/opt/rocm/opencl/bin" | sudo tee -a /etc/profile.d/rocm.sh

Reboot the system. You can now run rocminfo and clinfo to verify that ROCm was installed.

Install Stable Diffusion WebUI

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sudo apt-get -y install git
git clone https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui.git
cd stable-diffusion-webui/

Move your CKPT or SafeTensors files to the models/Stable-diffusion folder. Be sure to give your models meaningful filenames. You can find download links for various models at https://rentry.org/sdmodels.

Open webui-user.sh and edit it as needed. You must uncomment and set COMMANDLINE_ARGS to include --disable-safe-unpickle since PyTorch 1.11 does not support that feature. Additionally, you may need to add --medvram --opt-split-attention if your GPU does not have much VRAM. See the comments in the file for more information.

When you are ready to continue, if you have changed your terminal's current working directory, change it back to the WebUI folder.

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cd ~/stable-diffusion-webui/

Install PyTorch

Official builds of PyTorch no longer support GFX8, so you must install binaries specially compiled for this architecture.

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mkdir /tmp/torch/
wget -P /tmp/torch/ https://github.com/xuhuisheng/rocm-gfx803/releases/download/rocm500/torch-1.11.0a0+git503a092-cp38-cp38-linux_x86_64.whl
wget -P /tmp/torch/ https://github.com/xuhuisheng/rocm-gfx803/releases/download/rocm500/torchvision-0.12.0a0+2662797-cp38-cp38-linux_x86_64.whl
sudo apt-get -y install python3-venv
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install /tmp/torch/*.whl

Configure Swap File

For systems with 16GB system RAM or more:

You should disable the swap file to increase performance and avoid unnecessary wear on your storage device.

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cat /etc/fstab | sed -e "/\sswap\s/s/^/# /g" | sudo tee /etc/fstab
sudo swapoff /swapfile

For systems with less than 16GB system RAM:

Do not disable the swap file. However, you should consider adding more RAM to your system if you plan to use WebUI frequently.

WebUI may crash with a simple Killed error message while launching, usually when loading model weights. This may be caused by the program running out of both memory and swap space. You can allocate a larger swap file to see if this resolves the issue.

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sudo swapoff /swapfile
sudo fallocate -l 8G /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

Run free -h to confirm that the swap file has been set up as expected.

Launch Stable Diffusion WebUI

Skip the following step this time, but in the future, after you have restarted your terminal application or rebooted the system, remember to change to the WebUI folder and activate the virtual environment before launching WebUI.

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cd ~/stable-diffusion-webui/
source venv/bin/activate

Finally, launch the program.

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./webui.sh

Launching the program for the first time may take quite a while. Eventually, you should see a URL such as http://127.0.0.1:7860, which you can open in Firefox to access WebUI's web interface.

Happy prompting!

Change Log

2023-10-25

• Remove unneeded system specifications.
• Remove comment about model.ckpt filename, since that has been irrelevant for a long time.
• Rewrite section regarding the swap file.
• Refer to the program as WebUI instead of SDW.