Try AI training with ROCm and LoRA by bmwiedemann

Description

I want to setup a Radeon RX 9600 XT 16 GB at home with ROCm on Slowroll.

Goals

I want to test how fast AI inference can get with the GPU and if I can use LoRA to re-train an existing free model for some task.

Resources

• https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/compatibility/compatibility-matrix.html
• https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/science:GPU:ROCm
• https://src.opensuse.org/ROCm/
• https://www.suse.com/c/lora-fine-tuning-llms-for-text-classification/

Results

got inference working with llama.cpp:

export LLAMACPP_ROCM_ARCH=gfx1200
HIPCXX="$(hipconfig -l)/clang" HIP_PATH="$(hipconfig -R)" \
cmake -S . -B build -DGGML_HIP=ON -DAMDGPU_TARGETS=$LLAMACPP_ROCM_ARCH \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DLLAMA_CURL=ON \
-Dhipblas_DIR=/usr/lib64/cmake/hipblaslt/ \
&& cmake --build build --config Release -j8
m=models/gpt-oss-20b-mxfp4.gguf
cd $P/llama.cpp && build/bin/llama-server --model $m --threads 8 --port 8005 --host 0.0.0.0 --device ROCm0 --n-gpu-layers 999

Without the --device option it faulted. Maybe because my APU also appears there?

I updated/fixed various related packages: https://src.opensuse.org/ROCm/rocm-examples/pulls/1 https://src.opensuse.org/ROCm/hipblaslt/pulls/1 SR 1320959

benchmark

I benchmarked inference with llama.cpp + gpt-oss-20b-mxfp4.gguf and ROCm offloading to a Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB. I varied the number of layers that went to the GPU:

• 0 layers 14.49 tokens/s (8 CPU cores)
• 9 layers 17.79 tokens/s 34% VRAM
• 15 layers 22.39 tokens/s 51% VRAM
• 20 layers 27.49 tokens/s 64% VRAM
• 24 layers 41.18 tokens/s 74% VRAM
• 25+ layers 86.63 tokens/s 75% VRAM (only 200% CPU load)

So there is a significant performance-boost if the whole model fits into the GPU's VRAM.

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Is SUSE Trending? Popularity and Developer Sentiment Insight Using Native AI Capabilities by terezacerna

Description

This project aims to explore the popularity and developer sentiment around SUSE and its technologies compared to Red Hat and their technologies. Using publicly available data sources, I will analyze search trends, developer preferences, repository activity, and media presence. The final outcome will be an interactive Power BI dashboard that provides insights into how SUSE is perceived and discussed across the web and among developers.

Goals

1. Assess the popularity of SUSE products and brand compared to Red Hat using Google Trends.
2. Analyze developer satisfaction and usage trends from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
3. Use the GitHub API to compare SUSE and Red Hat repositories in terms of stars, forks, contributors, and issue activity.
4. Perform sentiment analysis on GitHub issue comments to measure community tone and engagement using built-in Copilot capabilities.
5. Perform sentiment analysis on Reddit comments related to SUSE technologies using built-in Copilot capabilities.
6. Use Gnews.io to track and compare the volume of news articles mentioning SUSE and Red Hat technologies.
7. Test the integration of Copilot (AI) within Power BI for enhanced data analysis and visualization.
8. Deliver a comprehensive Power BI report summarizing findings and insights.
9. Test the full potential of Power BI, including its AI features and native language Q&A.

Resources

1. Google Trends: Web scraping for search popularity data
2. Stack Overflow Developer Survey: For technology popularity and satisfaction comparison
3. GitHub API: For repository data (stars, forks, contributors, issues, comments).
4. Gnews.io API: For article volume and mentions analysis.
5. Reddit: SUSE related topics with comments.

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Extended private brain - RAG my own scripts and data into offline LLM AI by tjyrinki_suse

Description

For purely studying purposes, I'd like to find out if I could teach an LLM some of my own accumulated knowledge, to use it as a sort of extended brain.

I might use qwen3-coder or something similar as a starting point.

Everything would be done 100% offline without network available to the container, since I prefer to see when network is needed, and make it so it's never needed (other than initial downloads).

Goals

1. Learn something about RAG, LLM, AI.
2. Find out if everything works offline as intended.
3. As an end result have a new way to access my own existing know-how, but so that I can query the wisdom in them.
4. Be flexible to pivot in any direction, as long as there are new things learned.

Resources

To be found on the fly.

Timeline

Day 1 (of 4)

• Tried out a RAG demo, expanded on feeding it my own data
• Experimented with qwen3-coder to add a persistent chat functionality, and keeping vectors in a pickle file
• Optimizations to keep everything within context window
• Learn and add a bit of PyTest

Day 2

• More experimenting and more data
• Study ChromaDB
• Add a Web UI that works from another computer even though the container sees network is down

Day 3

• The above RAG is working well enough for demonstration purposes.
• Pivot to trying out OpenCode, configuring local Ollama qwen3-coder there, to analyze the RAG demo.
• Figured out how to configure Ollama template to be usable under OpenCode. OpenCode locally is super slow to just running qwen3-coder alone.

Day 4 (final day)

• Battle with OpenCode that was both slow and kept on piling up broken things.
• Call it success as after all the agentic AI was working locally.
• Clean up the mess left behind a bit.

Blog Post

Summarized the findings at blog post.

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MCP Server for SCC by digitaltomm

Description

Provide an MCP Server implementation for customers to access data on scc.suse.com via MCP protocol. The core benefit of this MCP interface is that it has direct (read) access to customer data in SCC, so the AI agent gets enhanced knowledge about individual customer data, like subscriptions, orders and registered systems.

Architecture

Goals

We want to demonstrate a proof of concept to connect to the SCC MCP server with any AI agent, for example gemini-cli or codex. Enabling the user to ask questions regarding their SCC inventory.

For this Hackweek, we target that users get proper responses to these example questions:

• Which of my currently active systems are running products that are out of support?
• Do I have ready to use registration codes for SLES?
• What are the latest 5 released patches for SLES 15 SP6? Output as a list with release date, patch name, affected package names and fixed CVEs.
• Which versions of kernel-default are available on SLES 15 SP6?

Technical Notes

Similar to the organization APIs, this can expose to customers data about their subscriptions, orders, systems and products. Authentication should be done by organization credentials, similar to what needs to be provided to RMT/MLM. Customers can connect to the SCC MCP server from their own MCP-compatible client and Large Language Model (LLM), so no third party is involved.

Milestones

[x] Basic MCP API setup
  MCP endpoints
  [x] Products / Repositories
  [x] Subscriptions / Orders 
  [x] Systems
  [x] Packages
[x] Document usage with Gemini CLI, Codex

Resources

• fast_mcp library for Rails
• MCP test client
• SCC branch

Gemini CLI setup:

~/.gemini/settings.json:

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Explore LLM evaluation metrics by thbertoldi

Description

Learn the best practices for evaluating LLM performance with an open-source framework such as DeepEval.

Goals

Curate the knowledge learned during practice and present it to colleagues.

-> Maybe publish a blog post on SUSE's blog?

Resources

https://deepeval.com

https://docs.pactflow.io/docs/bi-directional-contract-testing

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Song Search with CLAP by gcolangiuli

Description

Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) is an open-source library that enables the training of a neural network on both Audio and Text descriptions, making it possible to search for Audio using a Text input. Several pre-trained models for song search are already available on huggingface

Goals

Evaluate how CLAP can be used for song searching and determine which types of queries yield the best results by developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in Python. Based on the results of this MVP, future steps could include:

• Music Tagging;
• Free text search;
• Integration with an LLM (for example, with MCP or the OpenAI API) for music suggestions based on your own library.

The code for this project will be entirely written using AI to better explore and demonstrate AI capabilities.

Result

In this MVP we implemented:

• Async Song Analysis with Clap model
• Free Text Search of the songs
• Similar song search based on vector representation
• Containerised version with web interface

We also documented what went well and what can be improved in the use of AI.

You can have a look at the result here:

• Result Presentation
• hw25-song-search Github repo

Future implementation can be related to performance improvement and stability of the analysis.

References

• CLAP: The main model being researched;
• huggingface: Pre-trained models for CLAP;
• Free Music Archive: Creative Commons songs that can be used for testing;

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SUSE Observability MCP server by drutigliano

Description

The idea is to implement the SUSE Observability Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server as a specialized, middle-tier API designed to translate the complex, high-cardinality observability data from StackState (topology, metrics, and events) into highly structured, contextually rich, and LLM-ready snippets.

This MCP Server abstract the StackState APIs. Its primary function is to serve as a Tool/Function Calling target for AI agents. When an AI receives an alert or a user query (e.g., "What caused the outage?"), the AI calls an MCP Server endpoint. The server then fetches the relevant operational facts, summarizes them, normalizes technical identifiers (like URNs and raw metric names) into natural language concepts, and returns a concise JSON or YAML payload. This payload is then injected directly into the LLM's prompt, ensuring the final diagnosis or action is grounded in real-time, accurate SUSE Observability data, effectively minimizing hallucinations.

Goals

• Grounding AI Responses: Ensure that all AI diagnoses, root cause analyses, and action recommendations are strictly based on verifiable, real-time data retrieved from the SUSE Observability StackState platform.
• Simplifying Data Access: Abstract the complexity of StackState's native APIs (e.g., Time Travel, 4T Data Model) into simple, semantic functions that can be easily invoked by LLM tool-calling mechanisms.
• Data Normalization: Convert complex, technical identifiers (like component URNs, raw metric names, and proprietary health states) into standardized, natural language terms that an LLM can easily reason over.
• Enabling Automated Remediation: Define clear, action-oriented MCP endpoints (e.g., execute_runbook) that allow the AI agent to initiate automated operational workflows (e.g., restarts, scaling) after a diagnosis, closing the loop on observability.

 Hackweek STEP

• Create a functional MCP endpoint exposing one (or more) tool(s) to answer queries like "What is the health of service X?") by fetching, normalizing, and returning live StackState data in an LLM-ready format.

 Scope

• Implement read-only MCP server that can:
  • Connect to a live SUSE Observability instance and authenticate (with API token)
  • Use tools to fetch data for a specific component URN (e.g., current health state, metrics, possibly topology neighbors, ...).
  • Normalize response fields (e.g., URN to "Service Name," health state DEVIATING to "Unhealthy", raw metrics).
  • Return the data as a structured JSON payload compliant with the MCP specification.

Deliverables

• MCP Server v0.1 A running Golang MCP server with at least one tool.
• A README.md and a test script (e.g., curl commands or a simple notebook) showing how an AI agent would call the endpoint and the resulting JSON payload.

Outcome A functional and testable API endpoint that proves the core concept: translating complex StackState data into a simple, LLM-ready format. This provides the foundation for developing AI-driven diagnostics and automated remediation.

Resources

• https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/its-the-end-of-observability-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine
• https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-remote-mcp-server
• https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/index
• https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/develop/build-server

 Basic implementation

• https://github.com/drutigliano19/suse-observability-mcp-server

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Results

Successfully developed and delivered a fully functional SUSE Observability MCP Server that bridges language models with SUSE Observability's operational data. This project demonstrates how AI agents can perform intelligent troubleshooting and root cause analysis using structured access to real-time infrastructure data.

Example execution

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AI-Powered Unit Test Automation for Agama by joseivanlopez

The Agama project is a multi-language Linux installer that leverages the distinct strengths of several key technologies:

• Rust: Used for the back-end services and the core HTTP API, providing performance and safety.
• TypeScript (React/PatternFly): Powers the modern web user interface (UI), ensuring a consistent and responsive user experience.
• Ruby: Integrates existing, robust YaST libraries (e.g., yast-storage-ng) to reuse established functionality.

The Problem: Testing Overhead

Developing and maintaining code across these three languages requires a significant, tedious effort in writing, reviewing, and updating unit tests for each component. This high cost of testing is a drain on developer resources and can slow down the project's evolution.

The Solution: AI-Driven Automation

This project aims to eliminate the manual overhead of unit testing by exploring and integrating AI-driven code generation tools. We will investigate how AI can:

1. Automatically generate new unit tests as code is developed.
2. Intelligently correct and update existing unit tests when the application code changes.

By automating this crucial but monotonous task, we can free developers to focus on feature implementation and significantly improve the speed and maintainability of the Agama codebase.

Goals

• Proof of Concept: Successfully integrate and demonstrate an authorized AI tool (e.g., gemini-cli) to automatically generate unit tests.
• Workflow Integration: Define and document a new unit test automation workflow that seamlessly integrates the selected AI tool into the existing Agama development pipeline.
• Knowledge Sharing: Establish a set of best practices for using AI in code generation, sharing the learned expertise with the broader team.

Contribution & Resources

We are seeking contributors interested in AI-powered development and improving developer efficiency. Whether you have previous experience with code generation tools or are eager to learn, your participation is highly valuable.

If you want to dive deep into AI for software quality, please reach out and join the effort!

• Authorized AI Tools: Tools supported by SUSE (e.g., gemini-cli)
• Focus Areas: Rust, TypeScript, and Ruby components within the Agama project.

Interesting Links

• goose

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