Re: AMD ROCm packaging session followup notes
On Fri, 2021-11-26 at 12:59 +0530, Karthik wrote:
>
> It's good to see that AMD is working with Debian in packaging rocm
> apart from making it open-source unlike CuDNN
>
> Nvidia didn't even bother to make cudnn publicly available without
> creating nvidia developer account and only provides packages for
> Ubuntu 18.04 (i mean for every other distro the package repositories
> are incomplete).
In fact, cudnn library can be redistributed under a series of
complicated conditions as per the cudnn EULA, after downloading
with a personal accounts. Anonymous download links for cudnn also
exist (see archlinux PKGDBUILD for cudnn).
I once tried to read the cudnn license and get it into Debian.
I had given up eventually since I strongly feel I'm not working
with a friendly thing.
I use CUDA to train neural networks for dayjob, but for Debian
development I look forward to SYCL/ROCm's breaking the monopoly
in open-source manner.
> And another issue we have to address is tensorflow packaging which is
> still pending
True. It's a hard target. I personally prefer pytorch than tensorflow,
so I'm still maintaining the pytorch package.
Pytorch is also a good candidate for adding the ROCm support.
> Hopefully we can build tf with cpu+rocm+onednn for now and later
> think about adding cudnn support if anything changes with Nvidia
TBH cudnn is the most useful library for neural network acceleration,
but is meanwhile the most annoying library to package.
> This insightfully written policy needs some attention:
> https://people.debian.org/~lumin/debian-dl.html
>
Thank you for the attention. It's not out-of-date, but I think I should
add some more updates to it when I have time.
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