[arch-dev-public] Opencl/Cuda headers

[Stéphane Gaudreault]

Le jeudi 11 novembre 2010 19:23:25, Stéphane Gaudreault a écrit :
> Le samedi 30 octobre 2010 00:45:58, Stéphane Gaudreault a écrit :
> > Since version 260.19.12, upstream developers of nvidia-utils dropped C
> > headers for OpenCL and Cuda. After a discussion with Ionuț on IRC, we
> > agreed that it would be good to ask other developers on the best way to
> > provide these headers.
> > 
> > For those unfamiliar with these programming languages/libraries, there
> > are part of the so-called GPGPU technologies (General-Purpose Processing
> > on Graphical Processing Unit), where the primary objective is to perform
> > any type of parallel computing on graphics processors. For example, I am
> > using OpenCL in a personal programming project to speed up a partial
> > differential equation solver. OpenCL is an open standard that has been
> > recently (May 2009) ratified by The Khronos Group. C for Cuda is a
> > similar proprietary solutions from Nvidia. Nvidia-utils contains the
> > dynamic libraries for both OpenCL and Cuda. Other vendors, like AMD and
> > Intel, provide or will provide soon an implementation of OpenCL for
> > their GPUs.
> > 
> > To get a satisfactory OpenCL developement environment, it could be as
> > simple as creating a new package that provide the header files. These
> > headers can be either downloaded from The Khronos Group[1] (like this
> > [2]) or extracted from the Nividia toolkit[3].
> > 
> > However, for Cuda, it might be a little more complicated because it must
> > use a compiler provided by nvidia (nvcc).  A solution may be to create a
> > package for the Cuda Toolkit. The main disadvantage of this solution is
> > the addition of proprietary software for which we can only provide
> > limited support in case of bugs or incompatibility with other updates.
> > According to the maintainer of the Cuda package in AUR [4], Cuda
> > requires gcc version 4.4 (it is broken with version 4.5) and sometimes
> > releases depend on beta drivers[5]. I think it is probably better to
> > wait until these dependency problems are fixed before thinking about
> > inclusion in [extra] or [community].
> > 
> > My suggestion would be to package only OpenCL headers (Khronos version)
> > and eventually discuss addition of Cuda if it becomes easier to maintain
> > in a rolling release distribution. The new "khronos-opencl-headers"
> > package could be added as optional dependencies for nvidia-utils which
> > will also include a "provides=('libCL')"[6]. I tested this solution on
> > several codes and it works well. It also seems that Debian is going to
> > do something very similar[7].
> > 
> > So what do other people think about this problem ?
> > 
> > Stéphane
> > 
> >  [1] http://www.khronos.org/registry/cl
> >  [2] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=35367
> >  [3] http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda_3_2_toolkit_rc.html
> >  [4] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=3D23597
> >  [5] Personnal communication
> >  [6] cf. FS#20558
> >  [7] http://ftp-master.debian.org/new/khronos-opencl-
> > 
> > headers_1.0-2010.06.13-1.html
> 
> It seems the Cuda/OpenCL/vdpau headers are back in nvidia-utils version
> 260.19.21-1.
> 
> Stéphane is happy again :-)

Sorry for the noise, I was misled by a post on the Nvidia forum. The changelog 
still say (see bellow) that the headers are no longer packaged with the 
driver. 

Following the suggestion of Andreas, I will try to bring them to [community] 
if they get enough votes in AUR.

Stéphane

== NVIDIA_Changelog ==
[...]
    * Stopped packaging and installing OpenGL, VDPAU, CUDA, and OpenCL
      header files with the driver.  Those interested in these files can
      get them from their Linux distributions' packages, where available,
      or upstream from:

        OpenGL header files (gl.h, glext.h glx.h, glxext.h):
            http://www.opengl.org/registry/

        VDPAU header files (vdpau.h and vdpau_x11.h):
            http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/VDPAU

        CUDA and OpenCL header files (cuda.h, cudaGL.h, cudaVDPAU.h,
                cl.h, cl_gl.h, cl_platform.h):
            http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gpucomputing.html

      Note that while libvdpau.so is still included in 260.xx drivers,
      it will be removed from a future release series in early 2011.
      Distributors are encouraged to package libvdpau.so from
      http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/VDPAU