xgboost: Building for R with GPU support fails at cmake step

I downloaded the tarball for xgboost-0.80 and followed the instructions for building for R with GPU support: https://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/latest/build.html#installing-r-package-with-gpu-support

The cmake step fails with

-- Setting build type to 'Release' as none was specified.
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:67 (add_subdirectory):
  The source directory

    [PATH]/xgboost-0.80/dmlc-core

  does not contain a CMakeLists.txt file.

However, if I clone the github repo, I don’t have that failure.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 6 years ago
Comments: 28 (3 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@adatum Yeah, I don’t know why the R installation process was giving you so much headache. Glad to hear that you got it to work finally. In the future, I’m hoping to find a way to make installation less painful.

hcho3 on Aug 19, 2018

So xgboost.so indeed contains all GPU code. Let’s double-check XGBoost package installation. Can you locate where the XGBoost R package has been installed? Check if the xgboost.so file there is the same as the one found in [PATH]/xgboost/build/R-package/src/xgboost.so.

hcho3 on Aug 19, 2018

I would prefer to use a numbered release for stability and reproduceability.

We use tags and branches to denote releases. So check out v0.80 tag to fix the commit to the time of 0.80 release. The release_0.80 branch is similar, but this one will contain a few backported changes.

To checkout the git repo with tag, run

git clone --recursive https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost -b v0.80

is there any intention or possibility to build GPU support directly in the xgboost package on CRAN?

Unfortunately, no. CRAN has strict requirement for multi-platform support, so shipping GPU native code in a R package is quite challenging. Currently, CRAN hosts a CPU-only xgboost package.

hcho3 on Aug 16, 2018