Fwd: MKL is redistributable; Should we package it?

[Ghislain Vaillant <ghisvail@gmail.com>]

Forgot to CC the list...

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ghislain Vaillant <ghisvail@gmail.com>
Date: ven. 30 mars 2018 à 08:43
Subject: Re: MKL is redistributable; Should we package it?
To: lumin <cdluminate@gmail.com>

Le ven. 30 mars 2018 à 08:18, Lumin <cdluminate@gmail.com> a écrit :

Hello d-science folks,

I noticed that intel's math kernel library is redistributable[1].

Since it is widely used in various fields, an mkl package

in Debian archive my be beneficial to at least science

software users.

However despite of the explicit declaration that MKL

is redistributable, MKL itself is a proprietary and

its source is not available. That means mkl must enter

nonfree, and the packaging is to simply repack a pile

of binary blobs.

As a co-maintainer of CUDA I really dislike working on

huge binary blobs that are permitted to redistribute.

But CUDA is still uploaded and maintained due to

its usefullness.

The effort is justified for CUDA due to the lack of established free alternatives (apart from OpenCL which Nvidia does not support fully).

For BLAS and FFT, there are already performant and established alternatives (OpenBLAS and FFTW), so the appeal to provide a non-free alternative is lower, imo.

That being said, I'd be happy if someone were to commit to provide MKL with the same level of quality as CUDA in Debian. You guys are doing a great job, afaic.

So, what's your opinion about the mkl package?

MKL itself contains BLAS routines, FFT, etc. Scientific

packages may possibly gain a performance boost

from mkl if they can be linked against mkl.

[1] https://software.intel.com/en-us/mkl/license-faq

--

Best,