Claude Rocm

Read-only AMD GPU monitoring for Claude Desktop on Linux. Lets Claude answer questions like "is my training run healthy?", "how hot is the GPU?", "how much VRAM is left?", and "which process is using the card?" — all without the ability to kill processes, change clocks, or otherwise perturb a running workload.

It shells out to rocm-smi (and optionally amdgpu_top) and exposes five strictly read-only tools. No process killing, no clock/power overrides, no fan control. For those, use a tool like gpu-kill.

Requirements

• Linux with an AMD GPU (RDNA2/3/4 consumer cards — RX 6000/7000/9000, R9700 — and CDNA data-center cards).
• amdgpu kernel module loaded (standard on modern Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora).
• rocm-smi installed:

  sudo apt install rocm-smi            # minimal
  # or a full ROCm stack:
  # https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/
  

Some metrics (clocks, power, detailed temperatures) require newer ROCm releases. If a metric isn't supported by your card/driver, the tool returns it as null rather than failing.

Install (Claude Desktop)

1. Download the latest ROCm.mcpb from the Releases page.
2. In Claude Desktop, open Settings → Extensions.
3. Scroll to Extension Developer at the bottom, click Install Extension, and pick the .mcpb file.
4. Enable the extension. The tools appear prefixed with rocm-gpu-monitor: in Claude's tool picker.

Tools

Tool	What it does
gpu_status	One-shot summary: name, utilization %, VRAM used/total, temps (edge/junction/memory), power avg/max, fan %/RPM.
gpu_metrics	Full rocm-smi -a --json dump — clocks, voltages, PCIe link, firmware versions, per-engine activity.
gpu_processes	Compute processes using the GPU (KFD PIDs) with VRAM usage and card index.
gpu_watch	Take N samples at a fixed interval and return raw frames plus per-card min/max/avg stats.
rocm_info	Installed ROCm/HIP packages, driver version, amdgpu module load status, amdgpu_top availability.

All tools carry the MCP readOnlyHint: true / destructiveHint: false / openWorldHint: false annotations.

Example prompts

"Is my training run stable? Watch the GPU for 20 seconds."

"How much VRAM is my current PyTorch process using?"

"Is the GPU thermal-throttling? What's the junction temperature?"

"What ROCm version is installed and is the driver loaded?"

Privacy policy

This extension runs entirely on your local machine and shells out only to the following programs, always read-only:

• rocm-smi — queries the AMD kernel driver for device metrics.
• amdgpu_top (if installed) — optional richer metrics.
• dpkg -l — enumerates installed ROCm-related packages by name/version.
• lsmod — checks whether the amdgpu kernel module is loaded.
• which — locates the above binaries at startup.

No data leaves your machine. This extension performs no network I/O, opens no sockets, and writes no files outside of standard process stdout/stderr (captured by Claude Desktop's log directory). It cannot modify GPU state (clocks, power, fan), kill processes, or otherwise perturb a running workload — every tool is strictly read-only.

The information visible to Claude includes GPU model and firmware versions, current VRAM usage, temperature/clock/power readings, running GPU-using process PIDs and their VRAM usage, and a list of installed ROCm-related packages. If you consider any of that sensitive (for example the list of running process PIDs on a shared machine), do not enable this extension.

Troubleshooting

"rocm-smi is not installed" — install it (sudo apt install rocm-smi). If you're using a non-Debian distro, follow AMD's ROCm install instructions.

Many fields come back as null on a new GPU — some metrics (clocks, power, temperature) depend on firmware support exposed through rocm-smi. On very new cards (e.g. RDNA4/R9700), individual rocm-smi --showclocks/--showpower may report "No JSON data to report" even though -a --json returns the data. This extension uses -a --json as the primary source to maximize coverage. If a specific field is unsupported on your card, it'll be null rather than an error.

Permission errors — rocm-smi normally runs without root. If you see permission errors, check that the user running Claude Desktop is in the render and video groups:

sudo usermod -aG render,video $USER
# log out and back in

Development

The server is a single ~300-line Node.js script with zero npm dependencies. To rebuild the .mcpb:

cd bundle-source
zip -j ../ROCm.mcpb manifest.json package.json server.js README.md LICENSE icon.png

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Related

• claude-terminal-mcp — shell, filesystem, and background jobs.
• claude-linux-mcp — X11 desktop control (screenshot, mouse, keyboard, windows, clipboard).