Status of MKL packages in debian - porting to Gentoo

[Aisha Tammy]

On 10/25/20 2:46 AM, Mo Zhou wrote:
> Hi Aisha,
> 
> Debian's MKL package is built from the standalone MKL package instead of
> the all-in-one parallel studio package:
> https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/intel-mkl/-/blob/master/debian/rules#L10
> 
> Specifically, intel has released the standalone MKL package under the
> Intel Simplified Software License (ISSL). Maybe the other components in
> the parallel studio have different licenses that may complicate the
> packaging?
> 
Thank you!!

This is good to know :)
Yes, you are correct. The "intel performance primitives" are 5 packages
which have other licenses and also available outside the parallel studio,
so those would be preferred for them.
The ICC, IFC compilers are not freely available.

> As a source-based distribution, adding mkl development files into
> the blas/lapack switch mechanism may cause problems. As the mkl-rt
> package contains only runtime libraries, it makes the packaging easier
> due the smaller number of files to deal with.
> 
Actually this should not be a problem.
The blas-lapack switch only changed paths in the runtime ld.so search
file /etc/ld.so.conf.
So the compile time linker actually only builds against the
reference blas/lapack libraries.

> libmkl_rt.so has no soname, and Intel Simplified Software License
> prohibits modification to these binary blobs. As a result, if we point
> libblas.so -> libmkl_rt.so, once we `gcc foobar.c -lblas`, `readelf
> a.out` will show that `a.out` needs `libmkl_rt.so` instead of
> `libblas.so.3`, which breaks the blas/lapack switch.
> 
> 
Thanks a lot for the clarifications :)
I really appreciate it.
I'll keep working on this, hopefully theres nothing else problematic.

Best,
Aisha

> On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 09:49:06AM -0400, Aisha Tammy wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am writing this email because I am currently working on cleaning up the intel
>>
>> packages in gentoo and was asking for details on how the debian packages are
>> made.
>>
>> Specifically I was wondering on which binary sources are used for creating the
>> packages
>>
>> There seem to be multiple versions and splits of software from intel.
>>
>> The gentoo mkl-rt package was originally made by Mo Zhou, who used continuum
>> sources
>>
>> as the binary base. I am not sure how continuum builds its packages.
>>
>> genoo has another tree at gentoo science, which uses intel parallel studio as
>> the binary
>>
>> base and then builds sub packages from that, like the icc, ifc, mkl packages.
>>
>> Now there are 3 diferent versions of parallel studio - composer, professional
>> and cluster.
>>
>> The details about the differences between them are not well documented and it
>> is possible
>>
>> that mixing them together is going to be a problem (I am not sure).
>>
>> So it would be nice to know which ones are used in your packages, so that we
>> may follow
>>
>> suite to make things a bit uniform across platforms.
>>
>>
>> Thanks a lot,
>>
>> Aisha
>>
> 
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>