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smoe
Journeyman III

Bringing AMD tools and libraries closer to Linux distributions

Linux distributions are open to external contributions, it is time for AMD to exploit that.

For distributing software that depends on AMD-specific libraries, one would prefer to ship  dynamically linked binaries and expect the user to have AMD-specific counterparts locally available. Similarly, for code that one releases the downstream developer shall find respective header files and libraries him/herself.

The way to  achieve this are (at least for the Linux world) the Linux distributions. While it would not be an ultimate requirement to become a part of the respective distribution, it seems straight forward to offer respective repositories - at least for the most common distributions.

For Debian/Ubuntu I could help myself, but you certainly have the folks also in-house. Hoping for AMD's skills to migrate to regular users more easily in some near future .... best wishes

Steffen

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3 Replies
bridgman
Staff

Steffen, are there specific libraries you are thinking about ? Most of our development kits do not require separate runtime libraries; the only obvious exception is the OpenCL portion of the Stream SDK. Are there any other libraries to consider ?

John

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John, thank you for your reply. It was the update of the Stream SDK that guided me to your site, indeed. I also understood the AMD Core Math Library to be a prime candidate. When thinking about build dependencies, it may also be the Open64 compiler suite, something from the GPU developer tools, possibly?

However, I feel that you may gain most from a better availability  of your developments to the regular programmer, who is just already very busy and overworked and does not want to distract himself too much with technical bits but knows at the same time to need further education all the time.

If you could arrange for some blog-like entries with some code snipplets or smallish howtos to introduce to your technoogies, and if those are practically directly executable since they install via apt-get/rpm, then you reach many more hearts than you can today.  This could be as simple as a pointer to some code that your compiler can do much better than gcc, or be something really surprising.

So, please start with the Stream SDK, go via math and you should get back more  from the community than just better sales figures.

Steffen

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The situation for the AMD-APP/Stream libraries on Debian is really good now. I am not sure about the degree that the AMD developers were involved in the development of those Debian packages, but what is described on

http://wiki.debian.org/ATIStream

works nicely for me. So, many thanks for that.

Still, my initial comment on all the other magic pieces of yours still holds. Please get them off your servers into everybody's machines and skill sets.

Steffen

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