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

[Giuseppe Bilotta]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 6:05 AM, Simon Richter <sjr at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 22.07.2016 23:35, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>
>> To clarify: the Intel OpenCL runtime for Ubuntu replaces the
>> libOpenCL.so and libOpenCL.so.1 links installed by e.g.
>> ocl-icd-libopencl1 with links to the alternatives system, that point
>> at Intel's own libOpenCL.so by default, and require manual
>> intervention to go back to using ocl-icd.
>
> Is that Beignet, or another OpenCL library? Beignet certainly supports ICD.

It's the proprietary Intel CPU OpenCL implementation, which is an ICD,
but also comes with a package that installs a proprietary libOpenCL
(which still _is_ an ICD loader)

>> We could probably use the same alternatives system used by Intel,
>> which is a main opencl-
>> libOpenCL.so  and a slave opencl-libOpenCL.so.1
>
> No, the packages providing libOpenCL.so.1 should conflict with each
> other. If someone explicitly wants to install a libOpenCL that is not an
> ICD loader, they can do so, but they lose configurability in the
> process. The proper interface to switch between implementations is ICD.

The question is whether or not we should allow installing multiple ICD
loaders, using something like the alternatives system to switch
between them without having to de/reinstall them when switching.