Install from Source

This page gives instructions on how to build and install the TVM package from scratch on various systems. It consists of two steps:

  1. First build the shared library from the C++ codes (libtvm.so for linux, libtvm.dylib for macOS and libtvm.dll for windows).

  2. Setup for the language packages (e.g. Python Package).

To get started, download tvm source code from the Download Page.

Developers: Get Source from Github

You can also choose to clone the source repo from github. It is important to clone the submodules along, with --recursive option.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/apache/tvm tvm

For windows users who use github tools, you can open the git shell, and type the following command.

git submodule init
git submodule update

Build the Shared Library

Our goal is to build the shared libraries:

  • On Linux the target library are libtvm.so and libtvm_runtime.so

  • On macOS the target library are libtvm.dylib and libtvm_runtime.dylib

  • On Windows the target library are libtvm.dll and libtvm_runtime.dll

It is also possible to build the runtime library only.

The minimal building requirements for the TVM libraries are:

  • A recent C++ compiler supporting C++ 17, at the minimum
    • GCC 7.1

    • Clang 5.0

    • Apple Clang 9.3

    • Visual Studio 2019 (v16.7)

  • CMake 3.18 or higher

  • We highly recommend to build with LLVM to enable all the features.

  • If you want to use CUDA, CUDA toolkit version >= 8.0 is required. If you are upgrading from an older version, make sure you purge the older version and reboot after installation.

  • On macOS, you may want to install Homebrew to easily install and manage dependencies.

  • Python is also required. Avoid using Python 3.9.X+ which is not supported. 3.7.X+ and 3.8.X+ should be well supported however.

To install the these minimal pre-requisites on Ubuntu/Debian like linux operating systems, execute (in a terminal):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-dev python3-setuptools gcc libtinfo-dev zlib1g-dev build-essential cmake libedit-dev libxml2-dev

Note that the version of CMake on apt may not be sufficiently up to date; it may be necessary to install it directly from Kitware’s third-party APT repository.

On Fedora/CentOS and related operating systems use:

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf groupinstall -y "Development Tools"
sudo dnf install -y python-devel ncurses-compat-libs zlib-devel cmake libedit-devel libxml2-devel

Use Homebrew to install the required dependencies for macOS running either the Intel or M1 processors. You must follow the post-installation steps specified by Homebrew to ensure the dependencies are correctly installed and configured:

brew install gcc git cmake
brew install llvm
brew install python@3.8

If you are on macOS with an M1 Processor you may need to use conda to manage dependencies while building. Specifically you may need, Miniforge to ensure that the dependencies obtained using pip are compatible with M1.

brew install miniforge
conda init
conda create --name tvm python=3.8
conda activate tvm

We use cmake to build the library. The configuration of TVM can be modified by editing config.cmake and/or by passing cmake flags to the command line:

  • First, check the cmake in your system. If you do not have cmake, you can obtain the latest version from official website

  • First create a build directory, copy the cmake/config.cmake to the directory.

    mkdir build
    cp cmake/config.cmake build
    
  • Edit build/config.cmake to customize the compilation options

    • On macOS, for some versions of Xcode, you need to add -lc++abi in the LDFLAGS or you’ll get link errors.

    • Change set(USE_CUDA OFF) to set(USE_CUDA ON) to enable CUDA backend. Do the same for other backends and libraries you want to build for (OpenCL, RCOM, METAL, VULKAN, …).

    • To help with debugging, ensure the embedded graph executor and debugging functions are enabled with set(USE_GRAPH_EXECUTOR ON) and set(USE_PROFILER ON)

    • To debug with IRs, set(USE_RELAY_DEBUG ON) and set environment variable TVM_LOG_DEBUG.

      export TVM_LOG_DEBUG="ir/transform.cc=1,relay/ir/transform.cc=1"
      
  • TVM requires LLVM for CPU codegen. We highly recommend you to build with the LLVM support on.

    • LLVM 4.0 or higher is needed for build with LLVM. Note that version of LLVM from default apt may lower than 4.0.

    • Since LLVM takes long time to build from source, you can download pre-built version of LLVM from LLVM Download Page.

      • Unzip to a certain location, modify build/config.cmake to add set(USE_LLVM /path/to/your/llvm/bin/llvm-config)

      • You can also directly set set(USE_LLVM ON) and let cmake search for a usable version of LLVM.

    • You can also use LLVM Nightly Ubuntu Build

      • Note that apt-package append llvm-config with version number. For example, set set(USE_LLVM llvm-config-10) if you installed LLVM 10 package

    • If you are a PyTorch user, it is recommended to set (USE_LLVM "/path/to/llvm-config --link-static") and set(HIDE_PRIVATE_SYMBOLS ON) to avoid potential symbol conflicts between different versions LLVM used by TVM and PyTorch.

    • On supported platforms, the Ccache compiler wrapper may be helpful for reducing TVM’s build time. There are several ways to enable CCache in TVM builds:

      • Leave USE_CCACHE=AUTO in build/config.cmake. CCache will be used if it is found.

      • Ccache’s Masquerade mode. This is typically enabled during the Ccache installation process. To have TVM use Ccache in masquerade, simply specify the appropriate C/C++ compiler paths when configuring TVM’s build system. For example: cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/lib/ccache/c++ ....

      • Ccache as CMake’s C++ compiler prefix. When configuring TVM’s build system, set the CMake variable CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER to an appropriate value. E.g. cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=ccache ....

  • We can then build tvm and related libraries.

    cd build
    cmake ..
    make -j4
    
    • You can also use Ninja build system instead of Unix Makefiles. It can be faster to build than using Makefiles.

    cd build
    cmake .. -G Ninja
    ninja
    
    • There is also a makefile in the top-level tvm directory that can automate several of these steps. It will create the build directory, copy the default config.cmake to the build directory, run cmake, then run make.

      The build directory can be specified using the environment variable TVM_BUILD_PATH. If TVM_BUILD_PATH is unset, the makefile assumes that the build directory inside tvm should be used. Paths specified by TVM_BUILD_PATH can be either absolute paths or paths relative to the base tvm directory. TVM_BUILD_PATH can also be set to a list of space-separated paths, in which case all paths listed will be built.

      If an alternate build directory is used, then the environment variable TVM_LIBRARY_PATH should be set at runtime, pointing to the location of the compiled libtvm.so and libtvm_runtime.so. If not set, tvm will look relative to the location of the tvm python module. Unlike TVM_BUILD_PATH, this must be an absolute path.

    # Build in the "build" directory
    make
    
    # Alternate location, "build_debug"
    TVM_BUILD_PATH=build_debug make
    
    # Build both "build_release" and "build_debug"
    TVM_BUILD_PATH="build_debug build_release" make
    
    # Use debug build
    TVM_LIBRARY_PATH=~/tvm/build_debug python3
    

If everything goes well, we can go to Python Package Installation

Building with a Conda Environment

Conda is a very handy way to the necessary obtain dependencies needed for running TVM. First, follow the conda’s installation guide to install miniconda or anaconda if you do not yet have conda in your system. Run the following command in a conda environment:

# Create a conda environment with the dependencies specified by the yaml
conda env create --file conda/build-environment.yaml
# Activate the created environment
conda activate tvm-build

The above command will install all necessary build dependencies such as cmake and LLVM. You can then run the standard build process in the last section.

If you want to use the compiled binary outside the conda environment, you can set LLVM to static linking mode set(USE_LLVM "llvm-config --link-static"). In this way, the resulting library won’t depend on the dynamic LLVM libraries in the conda environment.

The above instructions show how to use conda to provide the necessary build dependencies to build libtvm. If you are already using conda as your package manager and wish to directly build and install tvm as a conda package, you can follow the instructions below:

conda build --output-folder=conda/pkg  conda/recipe
# Run conda/build_cuda.sh to build with cuda enabled
conda install tvm -c ./conda/pkg

Building on Windows

TVM support build via MSVC using cmake. You will need to obtain a visual studio compiler. The minimum required VS version is Visual Studio Enterprise 2019 (NOTE: we test against GitHub Actions’ Windows 2019 Runner, so see that page for full details. We recommend following Building with a Conda Environment to obtain necessary dependencies and get an activated tvm-build environment. Then you can run the following command to build

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -A x64 -Thost=x64 ..
cd ..

The above command generates the solution file under the build directory. You can then run the following command to build

cmake --build build --config Release -- /m

Building ROCm support

Currently, ROCm is supported only on linux, so all the instructions are written with linux in mind.

  • Set set(USE_ROCM ON), set ROCM_PATH to the correct path.

  • You need to first install HIP runtime from ROCm. Make sure the installation system has ROCm installed in it.

  • Install latest stable version of LLVM (v6.0.1), and LLD, make sure ld.lld is available via command line.

Python Package Installation

TVM package

Depending on your development environment, you may want to use a virtual environment and package manager, such as virtualenv or conda, to manage your python packages and dependencies.

The python package is located at tvm/python There are two ways to install the package:

Method 1

This method is recommended for developers who may change the codes.

Set the environment variable PYTHONPATH to tell python where to find the library. For example, assume we cloned tvm on the directory /path/to/tvm then we can add the following line in ~/.bashrc. The changes will be immediately reflected once you pull the code and rebuild the project (no need to call setup again)

export TVM_HOME=/path/to/tvm
export PYTHONPATH=$TVM_HOME/python:${PYTHONPATH}
Method 2

Install TVM python bindings by setup.py:

# install tvm package for the current user
# NOTE: if you installed python via homebrew, --user is not needed during installaiton
#       it will be automatically installed to your user directory.
#       providing --user flag may trigger error during installation in such case.
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.9  # This is required for mac to avoid symbol conflicts with libstdc++
cd python; python setup.py install --user; cd ..

Python dependencies

Note that the --user flag is not necessary if you’re installing to a managed local environment, like virtualenv.

  • Necessary dependencies:

pip3 install --user numpy decorator attrs
  • If you want to use RPC Tracker

pip3 install --user tornado
  • If you want to use auto-tuning module

pip3 install --user tornado psutil 'xgboost<1.6.0' cloudpickle

Note on M1 macs, you may have trouble installing xgboost / scipy. scipy and xgboost requires some additional dependencies to be installed, including openblas and its dependencies. Use the following commands to install scipy and xgboost with the required dependencies and configuration. A workaround for this is to do the following commands:

brew install openblas gfortran

pip install pybind11 cython pythran

export OPENBLAS=/opt/homebrew/opt/openblas/lib/

pip install scipy --no-use-pep517

pip install 'xgboost<1.6.0'

Install Contrib Libraries

Enable C++ Tests

We use Google Test to drive the C++ tests in TVM. The easiest way to install GTest is from source.

git clone https://github.com/google/googletest
cd googletest
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON ..
make
sudo make install

After installing GTest, the C++ tests can be built and started with ./tests/scripts/task_cpp_unittest.sh or just built with make cpptest.