Contribution Guide

This is a guide aimed towards contributors of ChainerX which is mostly implemented in C++. It describes how to build the project and how to run the test suite so that you can get started contributing.

Note

Please refer to the Chainer Contribution Guide for the more general contribution guideline that is not specific to ChainerX. E.g. how to download the source code, manage git branches, send pull requests or contribute to Chainer’s Python code base.

Note

There is a public ChainerX Product Backlog.

Building the shared library

You can build the C++ ChainerX project to generate a shared library similar to any other cmake project. Run the following command from the root of the project to generate chainerx_cc/build/chainerx/libchainerx.so,

$ mkdir chainerx_cc/build
$ cd chainerx_cc/build
$ cmake ..
$ make

The CUDA support is enabled by, either setting CHAINERX_BUILD_CUDA=1 as an environment variable or specifying -DCHAINERX_BUILD_CUDA=1 in cmake. When building with the CUDA support, either the CUDNN_ROOT_DIR environment variable or -DCUDNN_ROOT_DIR is required to locate the cuDNN installation path.

Note

CUDA without cuDNN is currently not supported.

Then, to install the headers and the library, run:

$ make install

You can specify the installation path using the prefix -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<...> in cmake.

Running the test suite

The test suite can be built by passing -DCHAINERX_BUILD_TEST=ON to cmake. It is not built by default. Once built, run the suite with the following command from within the build directory.

$ cd chainerx_cc/build
$ ctest -V

Coding standards

The ChainerX C++ coding standard is mostly based on the Google C++ Style Guide and principles.

Formatting

ChainerX is formatted using clang-format. To fix the formatting in-place, run the following command from chainerx_cc directory:

$ cd chainerx_cc
$ scripts/run-clang-format.sh --in-place

Lint checking

ChainerX uses the cpplint and clang-tidy for lint checking. Note that clang-tidy requires that you’ve finished running cmake. To run cpplint, run scripts/run-cpplint.sh from chainerx_cc directory:

$ cd chainerx_cc
$ scripts/run-cpplint.sh

To run clang-tidy, run make clang-tidy from the build directory:

$ cd chainerx_cc/build
$ make clang-tidy

Thread sanitizer

The thread sanitizer can be used to detect thread-related bugs, such as data races. To enable the thread sanitizer, pass -DCHAINERX_ENABLE_THREAD_SANITIZER=ON to cmake.

You can run the test with ctest -V as usual and you will get warnings if the thread sanitizer detects any issues.

CUDA runtime is known to cause a thread leak error as a false alarm. In such case, disable the thread leak detection using environment variable TSAN_OPTIONS='report_thread_leaks=0'.

Python contributions and unit tests

To test the Python binding, run the following command at the repository root:

$ pytest

The above command runs all the tests in the repository, including Chainer and ChainerMN. To run only ChainerX tests, specify the test directory:

$ pytest tests/chainerx_tests

Run tests with coverage:

$ pytest --cov --no-cov-on-fail --cov-fail-under=80 tests/chainerx_tests

Run tests without CUDA GPU:

$ pytest -m 'not cuda' tests/chainerx_tests