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TensorFlow from source on Fedora 26

Should be easy
Authors

TensorFlow from source

"This should be easy" = Famous last words... We'll see.

I used this very helpful guide but with the following differences :

  • This was a laptop install, so no GPU required
  • The gcc version issues discussed in the helpful guide above are really a CUDA problem.
  • Since I use the negativo Nvidia repo to deal with this, these compilation tweaks would have already been taken care of if I were using a GPU
  • Anaconda didn't seem necessary

Prepare the system packages

As root :

# Actually nothing new required...

Prepare user-land set-up

bazel installation

As a regular user :


wget https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/releases/download/0.5.4/bazel-0.5.4-installer-linux-x86_64.sh
# This downloads 185Mb of ...

chmod +x bazel-0.5.4-installer-linux-x86_64.sh

# This will install it to ~/bin/ which is Ok, since
# ```which missing-binary``` shows is in that path
./bazel-0.5.4-installer-linux-x86_64.sh --user

# Seems to unpack stuff..

bazel version

#Build label: 0.5.4
#Build target: bazel-out/local-fastbuild/bin/src/main/java/com/google/devtools/build/lib/bazel/BazelServer_deploy.jar
#Build time: Fri Aug 25 10:00:00 2017 (1503655200)

Download tensorflow

As a regular user :

git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow   # Downloads ~120Mb

cd tensorflow

Build tensorflow

This needs several preparatory steps :

  • Create a virtualenv so that Python knows which version it's building for
  • Set up the defaults correctly (some CLI interaction)
  • Build a pip package with bazel (iterate to fix the problems...)
  • Install the pip package

Set up Python : python-3.6 virtualenv

I did this in the repo base directory itself. That may have been an unhelpful choice, since (later) I found that I couldn't use import tensorflow there, since the repo itself has a tensorflow/__init__.py which seems to take priority. OTOH, this doesn't stop me using the newly built tensorflow anywhere else...

virtualenv-3.6 --system-site-packages env3
. ./env3/bin/activate

./configure machine compilation defaults

(All default options apart from adding XLA support) :

./configure

You have bazel 0.5.4 installed.
Please specify the location of python.
[Default is /home/andrewsm/OpenSource/tensorflow/env3/bin/python]:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: module 'site' has no attribute 'getsitepackages'
Found possible Python library paths:
  /home/andrewsm/OpenSource/tensorflow/env3/lib/python3.6/site-packages

Please input the desired Python library path to use.
Default is [/home/andrewsm/OpenSource/tensorflow/env3/lib/python3.6/site-packages]

Do you wish to build TensorFlow with jemalloc as malloc support? [Y/n]:
jemalloc as malloc support will be enabled for TensorFlow.

Do you wish to build TensorFlow with Google Cloud Platform support? [y/N]:
No Google Cloud Platform support will be enabled for TensorFlow.

Do you wish to build TensorFlow with Hadoop File System support? [y/N]:
No Hadoop File System support will be enabled for TensorFlow.

Do you wish to build TensorFlow with XLA JIT support? [y/N]: Y
XLA JIT support will be enabled for TensorFlow.

Do you wish to build TensorFlow with GDR support? [y/N]:
No GDR support will be enabled for TensorFlow.

Do you wish to build TensorFlow with VERBS support? [y/N]:
No VERBS support will be enabled for TensorFlow.

Do you wish to build TensorFlow with OpenCL support? [y/N]:
No OpenCL support will be enabled for TensorFlow.

Do you wish to build TensorFlow with CUDA support? [y/N]:
No CUDA support will be enabled for TensorFlow.

Do you wish to build TensorFlow with MPI support? [y/N]:
No MPI support will be enabled for TensorFlow.

Please specify optimization flags to use during compilation
when bazel option "--config=opt" is specified [Default is -march=native]:

Add "--config=mkl" to your bazel command to build with MKL support.
Please note that MKL on MacOS or windows is still not supported.
If you would like to use a local MKL instead of downloading,
please set the environment variable "TF_MKL_ROOT" every time before build.

Configuration finished

bazel build the pip package (builds tensorflow too)

This took over an hour (even when it worked cleanly) :

#bazel build --config=opt --config=cuda //tensorflow/tools/pip_package:build_pip_package
bazel build --config=opt //tensorflow/tools/pip_package:build_pip_package
# Lots of downloads...
# including protobuf, llvm, ...

ERROR: /home/andrewsm/.cache/bazel/_bazel_andrewsm/9351d4e112bea0cfc5cadba941a18293/external/boringssl/BUILD:116:1:
   C++ compilation of rule '@boringssl//:crypto' failed (Exit 1).

In file included from /usr/include/string.h:639:0,
                 from external/boringssl/src/crypto/asn1/a_bitstr.c:59:
In function 'memcpy',
    inlined from 'i2c_ASN1_BIT_STRING' at external/boringssl/src/crypto/asn1/a_bitstr.c:118:5:
/usr/include/bits/string3.h:53:10: error: '__builtin_memcpy': specified size between 18446744071562067968 and 18446744073709551615 exceeds maximum object size 9223372036854775807 [-Werror=stringop-overflow=]

Magic fix hints:

Finally iterate to the following (working) command line :

bazel build -c 0 --config=opt //tensorflow/tools/pip_package:build_pip_package
# 23:40 ... 01:10
# INFO: Elapsed time: 5218.471s, Critical Path: 86.01s

A second bazel build takes 9 seconds to figure out that nothing needs to be recompiled.

A third bazel build takes 0.5 seconds to figure out that nothing needs to be recompiled.

Build the pip whl package itself

This creates the 'wheel' in /tmp/tensorflow_pkg, and then installs it into the env3 :

bazel-bin/tensorflow/tools/pip_package/build_pip_package /tmp/tensorflow_pkg

pip install /tmp/tensorflow_pkg/tensorflow-*.whl

Size of built code

du -bh --exclude='env3/*'
# 194Mb  (including all the git history)

du -bh --exclude='.git/*' --exclude='env3/*'
# 69Mb

Test the install

You need to use the env3 with the freshly built tensorflow inside it, but then move to a directory other than the base repo, since that includes a 'distracting' tensorflow/__init__.py file. Then, run python to get a python prompt, and :

import tensorflow as tf

a = tf.constant([1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0], shape=[2, 3], name='a')
b = tf.constant([1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0], shape=[3, 2], name='b')
c = tf.matmul(a, b)

sess = tf.Session(config=tf.ConfigProto(log_device_placement=True))

print(sess.run(c))

should give you results (slightly reformatted) :

MatMul: (MatMul): /job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/cpu:0
2017-08-31 01:23:54.678983: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/simple_placer.cc:875]
  MatMul: (MatMul)/job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/cpu:0

b: (Const): /job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/cpu:0
2017-08-31 01:23:54.679009: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/simple_placer.cc:875]
  b: (Const)/job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/cpu:0

a: (Const): /job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/cpu:0
2017-08-31 01:23:54.679021: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/simple_placer.cc:875]
  a: (Const)/job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/cpu:0

[[ 22.  28.]
 [ 49.  64.]]

All Done!

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