hipblas optional dependency on rocsolver
Hello,
I'd like to add a patch into src:hipblas that would change librocsolver0
from a Depends to a Recommends or Suggests for libhipblas0 [1]. This
would cause the hipblas LU factorization functions (GETRF) to return the
status HIPBLAS_STATUS_NOT_IMPLEMENTED when rocsolver is not installed.
The main benefit of this patch is to allow programs that depend on
hipblas solely for BLAS operations (e.g. llama.cpp), to forgo installing
librocsolver.so.0 (thereby saving 1.5GB of disk space). This is the same
approach used by rocsolver itself to make rocsparse an optional
dependency (for the sparse factorization API --- though, we have not yet
updated the rocsolver package in Debian to the version that has the
sparse factorization API).
I initially felt that hipblas should mark librocsolver0 as Recommends,
as it has historically been something that users can expect to be
included (and is typically included on other distributions). Though, I
do have a hard time saying with a straight face that it would be unusual
to install libhipblas0 without librocsolver0, as I suspect that will be
common for applications such as llama.cpp. As per the policy manual,
that would then imply it should be Suggests [2]. Still, I'm quite
uncertain. Your feedback would be appreciated on this matter.
I also wonder if there may be any additional considerations for making
this change.
Sincerely,
Cory Bloor
[1]: https://github.com/ROCm/hipBLAS/pull/903
[2]: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html
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