[Pkg-opencl-devel] Alternatives system for libOpenCL?

[Giuseppe Bilotta]

Hello all,

On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 9:36 AM, Rebecca N. Palmer
<rebecca_palmer at zoho.com> wrote:
> beignet doesn't provide a libopencl1 (beignet/libcl.so is the ICD); this is
> probably referring to Intel's CPU OpenCL implementation, which isn't in
> Debian (or Ubuntu - are you referring to the package distributed by Intel
> itself, https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-drivers ?) for
> licensing reasons.

Yes, I'm referring to the proprietary CPU implementation of OpenCL by
Intel, installed via the package Intel distributes on their website
(and which officially doesn't support Debian; moreover, as I
discovered recently, it will actually refuse to install if beignet is
installed!)

> The hardware-specific part is the ICD, not the libopencl1, but I do not know
> whether the Intel CPU package allows these to be installed separately.

The Intel-distributed blob comes in three packages, a -base with
libOpenCL.so.2.0 (plus symlinks, plus the alternatives), and the
-intel-cpu packaged with the CPU ICD

> Ordinary CPUs (but possibly not Xeon Phi?) can use pocl-opencl-icd instead.

While technically they can, performance is still not comparable to
what Intel manages to achieve, frequently. Also, having multiple ICDs
for the same hardware is useful for research and validation (I have
AMD's, —even on machine without AMD GPUs—, Intel's, and pocl)..

> Mixing packages built with versioned-symbols and unversioned-symbols
> libopencl1 has been known to break:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=743740

I'm not sure how Intel's libOpenCL is set up.

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta