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

[Giuseppe Bilotta]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 2:53 PM, Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml at free.fr> wrote:
>   So, I'm very dubious about introducing a fragile setup (be it
> alternatives or diversion) in Debian, just to workaround a very
> buggy external package.

OTOH, it would seem that Intel has —in its own way— done the “least
aggressive” thing they could do to allow installation of their
libOpenCL alongside any existing system installation. Building the
system libraries with an alternative system already in place would
allow Intel to repackage theirs following what the system (Debian and
by derivation Ubuntu) would offer. Of course, the question remains of
whether they would do it. A safer alternative would be to provide a
Debian package (even if just a download wrapper) to manipulate the
Intel-provided rpms appropriately.

(That being said, I still think that offering an alternative system
would be useful. I know that at least myself would benefit from it,
since now and again I've had the need to test my clinfo against
different ICD loaders, and having to switch by
installation/deinstallation is rather annoying.)

>> 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
>
>   Did Intel bumped the soname? For what reason? If this is the case,
> we might want to have a ocl-icd-libopencl2 that install nearly the
> same library as ocl-icd-libopencl1 (but with a bumped SONAME) in order
> to be able to run programs compiled with the Intel libopencl.so
> (if so, we might want to put this package in contrib instead of main).

Actually, the SONAME was not bumped:

$ objdump -p /opt/intel/opencl/lib64/libOpenCL.so.2.0 | grep SONAME
SONAME libOpenCL.so.1

but the name of the actual file was. A quick comparison with the OCL
ICD loader as shipped in Debian unstable only shows an extra
dependency on libpthread, and no dependency on ld-linux-x86-64.so

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta