to be fair it wasn't clear that was an official AMD debugger and besides that's only for debugging ROCm applications.

this sentence doesn't make any sense a) ROCm is an AMD product b) ROCm "applications" are GPU "applications".

But not all GPU applications are ROCm applications (I would think).

I can certainly understand OP's confusion. Navigating parts of the GPU ecosystem that are new to you can be incredibly confusing.

there's 2 AMD KMD(kernel mode drivers) in linux: amdkfd and amdgpu .. the graphics applications use the amdgpu which is not supported by amdgdb .. amdgdb also has the limitation of requiring dwarf and and mesa/amd UMDs doesn't generate that ..

Do you know which one rocm uses?

amdkfd

Thank you!