LeelaZero / Patrick Traill on Linux

Here I, Patrick Traill, describe my experience installing LeelaZero (LZ) (and Lizzie) on my Linux system and the sad effect (with an illusory happy end) on my laptop battery.

Table of contents My configuration Installation Battery does not work properly Happy ending: an illusion Leap 15.2

My configuration

My configuration:

• Acer laptop with an Nvidia Geforce 750M GPU and 8 × Intel Core i7-4702MQ CPU @ 2.2 GHz and 11.6 GiB RAM.
• openSUSE Leap 15.0, kernel 4.12.14-lp150.12.64-default Qt 5.9.4
  • As of 2021-04-03: 15.2 | 5.3.18-lp152.66-default | 5.12.7
• Also MS Windows, I forget what the version is called

Installation

When I downloaded the Linux version of Lizzie I realised that I had no support for my GPU (Nvidia Geforce 750M) in my Suse Linux installation. I could not at first find the right driver or how to install it, so I decided to use a CPU-only LZ. For that on Linux I had to build it myself, but the latest release ( 0.17) failed to build ( bug 2378). I therefore followed the instructions to build the current version (git clone etc.), changing config.h to specify CPU-only. This was successful, though I had a bit of a struggle to get all the necessary headers, in particular /usr/include/qt5/QtWidgets/ (and therein QShortcut). This comes from package libQt5Widgets-devel, which was not listed in the instructions, as far as I could see. I believe some of the other needed packages were not quite 1-to-1 with the instructions, but were pretty obvious.

I then decided to try to get the GPU working, and studied the Nvidia support site. I added the nvidia repository in Yast and installed a bunch of packages, including nvidia-computeG05, nvidia-gfxG05-kmp-default, nvidia-glG05 and x11-video-nvidiaG05 (having previously had no luck with the G04 version). To install x11-video-nvidiaG05 I had to remove libOpenCL1 and ocl-icd-devel, which I did.

I did not pay much attention to how to use it in X11 as I only really cared about using it from Leela Zero, not sure if that was a mistake.

Battery does not work properly

After rebooting, at first the window system behaved very oddly, but after some Linux updates and logging out and in (¿or another reboot?) it settled down. I configured Lizzie to use the GPU version of new LZ and it worked, and was about 2½ times as fast as the CPU version, as measured by the number of variations analysed in a minute on an empty board (7.8k as against 3.2k at each hoshi). (Though I thought CPU had turned out faster than GPU on MSW.) The CPU version is reported as using 650% out of 800% CPU.

I then (c. 2019-06) noticed some odd behaviour in Linux: my battery was always reported as 44% full (MS Windows said 45%, as of 2019-10-03 it is down to 6%!) and the system stopped dead if I unplugged it to run on battery only. Moreover, if I suspended and resumed (without unplugging), LZ stopped immediately if it had been started by Lizzie.

Since MSW and Linux saw the same behaviour in the battery, I suspected something was damaged or at least changed in the battery or the BIOS and had no idea what to do about it, apart from asking in some forum. Since I almost always used the laptop plugged in at home, I did not seem to have an urgent problem, and did not get round to the forums.

Happy ending: an illusion

2020-01-29: A week or two ago I noticed that my battery was reported as charging, and it seems to have started behaving quite normally again. I can work with the laptop unplugged and it seems to go down at a normal rate. I can only guess that someone somewhere, probably at Nvidia, discovered and corrected a bug.

2020-06-22: Have not been here for some time, but sad to say, the bug has reappeared, and I still have no idea what is going on.

Leap 15.2

2021-04-02 Upgraded to Leap 15.2. Various packages in disabled repositories removed by upgrade!
2021-04-03 Rebuilt KataGo. Had to re-install GNU C++ for that. Also installed beignet, a CPU-only implementation of OpenCL; GPU not currently available via OpenCL.
2021-04-03 Rebuilt LeelaZero. Had to install various development packages (including libQt5Widgets-devel ) and append .0 to BLAS_openblas_LIBRARY:FILEPATH=/usr/lib64/libopenblas.so in generated CMakeCache.txt .