[Mesa-dev] Using --enable-opencl-icd by default and deprecating the toggle

[Aaron Watry]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 10:14 AM, Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Currently nearly all the distributions I've seen* enable and use the ICD.
> Only Gentoo does not use it, but manages the OpenCL.so conflicts via eselect.
>
> They have the ocl-icd library as a separate option, which makes me
> wonder how that's supposed to work. After all, for it to work the
> vendor package should:
> a) provided a binary not called libOpenCL.so (it could be called like
> that, but must be outside of ld's search path)
> b) provide a $foo.icd file, listing the ICD file/path name
>
> Most likely I'm having a dull moment somewhere and things work just fine.
>
> Considering that the --enable-opencl-icd is almost always set, I think
> we should change the default.
> Deprecating and removing it (at a later stage) also a nice option,
> since it will allow us to do some tidy-ups.

I'm in favor of building an ICD by default. I would like to at least
consider keeping the non-ICD option around as a configuration toggle
for now, given that there's been times I've had to deal with
bugs/issues in the ocl-icd library itself that could be ignored
temporarily or more easily diagnosed by just building clover as
libOpenCL.so directly...  That being said, if there's sufficient
motivation or demand from others, I'd be ok with removing the non-ICD
option at some point.

I've been using ICD builds myself for what feels like forever, and
can't really see much reason that anyone would want to do otherwise
outside of actual clover development. There's just too many chances
for drivers to conflict with each other if they're fighting over
libOpenCL.so.

--Aaron

>
> What do you guys think? I'd love to hear people's thoughts about this.
>
> Thanks
> Emil
>
> *Fedora, Suse, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD
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