kaldi/windows/INSTALL.md

Installation instructions for native Windows with Visual Studio

For cygwin installation, see the instructions in ../INSTALL.

Notes

• The recipes (in egs/) will not work. There is no commitment to support Windows. The Windows port of Kaldi is targeted at experienced developers who want to program their own apps using the kaldi libraries and are able to do the troubleshooting on their own.
• These instructions are valid March 2016, Intel® MKL and OpenBLAS are supported
• ATLAS is not supported and I personally have no intention to work on supporting it, as it requires whole cygwin environment
• We now (20150613) support CUDA on Windows as well. The build was tested on CUDA 7.0. It is possible that the compilation fails for significantly older CUDA SDK (less than, say, 5.0) Please note that CUDA support for windows is not really that usefull, because, the speed benefit during decoding is not large. And for training one would have to re-implement the while training pipeline (as the bash script wouldn't most probably work)
• While the 32bit project files will still be generated, we don't really care if they work or not. They will be removed in the near future.
• The build process were validated using MSVS2013 and partially (MKL only) using MSVS2015-rc
• We support only openfst-1.3.x for now.
• I suggest to have git installed -- not only because we will use it to download the source codes (you could download archives instead of it), but also because the windows version comes with a bunch of useful utilities.
• The examples will assume you have installed the git for windows and during the installation you chose the GIT Shell to install as well. Moreover, all the commands are issued from the same session.

Steps

1. Checkout Kaldi trunk, using git from https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi.git

   Example:

    $ git clone https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi.git kaldi
   

2. Enter the (kaldi)/tools directory in the freshly checked-out kaldi repo. All following actions should be taken in the tools dir.

   Example:

    $ cd (kaldi)/tools
    (kaldi)/tools$ pwd
   

3. Use git to clone the OpenFST(win) from

    https://github.com/jtrmal/openfstwin-1.3.4.git
   

   Example:

    (kaldi)/tools$ git clone https://github.com/jtrmal/openfstwin-1.3.4.git openfst
   

4. Download pthreads-win32 (or wget or curl)

   https://sourceforge.net/projects/pthreads4w/

    (kaldi)/tools$ curl -L -O http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/pthreads4w/pthreads-w32-2-9-1-release.zip
    (kaldi)/tools$ mkdir pthreads; cd pthreads
    (kaldi)/tools/pthreads$ unzip ../pthreads-w32-2-9-1-release.zip
   

5. Use patch (or you can use git patch) to patch the OpenFST(win).

   The patch location is tools/extras/openfstwin-1.3.4.patch

   Example:

    (kaldi)/tools$ cd openfst
    (kaldi)/tools/openfst$ patch -p1 <../extras/openfstwin-1.3.4.patch
   

   If you get this error: Assertion failed: hunk, file ../patch-2.5.9-src/patch.c, line 354 it is because the patch.c file should have Windows line endings (CRLF) rather than Unix ones (LF).

There are two options to use for BLAS (linear algebra): Intel® MKL and OpenBLAS. Intel® MKL is made by Intel and is optimised for their processors. It isn't free, but you can get Community Licensing for Intel® Performance Libraries or as part of Intel product suite if you qualify as students, educators, academic researchers, and open source contributors. OpenBLAS is free alternative with similar performance.

6. If using Intel® MKL, install it.

7. If using OpenBLAS, download the binary packages.

   https://sourceforge.net/projects/openblas

    (kaldi)/tools$ curl -L -O http://sourceforge.net/projects/openblas/files/v0.2.14/OpenBLAS-v0.2.14-Win64-int32.zip
    (kaldi)/tools$ curl -L -O http://sourceforge.net/projects/openblas/files/v0.2.14/mingw64_dll.zip
    (kaldi)/tools$ unzip OpenBLAS-v0.2.14-Win64-int32.zip
    (kaldi)/tools$ unzip mingw64_dll.zip
   

   Be careful to download "Win64-int32" and not "Win64-int64"!

8. If you want enabled CUDA support, download and install NVIDIA CUDA SDK. Be careful and strive for as standard install as possible. The installer set certain environment variables on which the MSVC Build rules rely. If you call "set" in the command line, you should see:

    (kaldi)/tools $ set | grep CUDA
    CUDA_PATH='C:\Users\Yenda\Downloads\cuda'
    CUDA_PATH_V7_0='C:\Users\Yenda\Downloads\cuda'
    NVCUDASAMPLES7_0_ROOT='C:\Users\Yenda\Downloads\cuda'
    NVCUDASAMPLES_ROOT='C:\Users\Yenda\Downloads\cuda'
   

   The first one (CUDA_PATH) is particularly important.

9. Open the OpenFST solution in Visual Studio

   • for Visual Studio 2013, the correct solution is in MSVC12 directory
   • for Visual Studio 2015, the correct solution is in MSVC14 directory

   Switch the configuration to debug|x64 and build the solution.

   Do the same for configuration release|x64.

   If either of the two won't build, you should stop here and start figuring what's different!

10. Enter the (kaldi)/windows directory

    Example:

     (kaldi)/tools/openfst$ cd ../../windows
     (kaldi)/windows $ pwd
    

11. Copy variables.props.dev to variables.props. Then modify the file variables.props to reflect the correct paths, using your favorite text editor. Don't worry, it's a text file, even though you have to be careful to keep the structure itself intact

     (kaldi)/windows $ vim variables.props
    

    If you plan to use MKL, you can ignore the OPENBLASDIR path. If you plan to use OpenBLAS, you can ignore the MKLDIR path. No matter what you plan to use, set both the OPENFST* and PTHREADW variables correctly

12. For OpenBLAS support, copy the file kaldiwin_openblas.props to kaldiwin.props

13. For MKL support, copy the kaldiwin_mkl.props to kaldiwin.props

14. Call the script that generates the MSVC solution

     ./generate_solution.pl --vsver <default|vs2013|vs2015> [--enable-cuda] [--enable-openblas] [--enable-mkl]
    

    --enable-mkl is the default so you shouldn't need to use it. If --enable-openblas is passed it disables MKL support. CUDA is disabled by default. The default Visual Studio version is 11.0 (Visual Studio 2012).

    For example, for a build using OpenBLAS and VS 2015 you would run:

     (kaldi)/tools$ generate_solution.pl --vsver vs2015 --enable-openblas
    

    Another example, for OpenBLAS, VS 2013 and CUDA support:

     (kaldi)/tools$ generate_solution.pl --vsver vs2013 --enable-cuda --enable-openblas
    

15. Open the generated solution in the visual studio and switch to Debug|x64 (or Release|x64) and build. Expect 10 projects to fail, majority of them will fail because of missing include portaudio.h

---

NOTE: I'm leaving the information about ATLAS here, for reference (also do not forget to consult the README.ATLAS)

(B) either (i) compile ATLAS under cygwin [see INSTALL.atlas] and copy kaldiwin_atlas.props to kaldiwin.props

(D) If you had installed ATLAS, you next have to do this: [assuming you are one level above this directory]

cd kaldiwin_vs10_auto/

Type the following (these commands were done from cygwin): note that these commands are a bit wasteful of disk; you could alternatively ensure that [root]/tools/ATLAS/cygwin_build/install/lib/ is always on your path when you run the binaries.

mkdir -p Debug Release
cp ../tools/ATLAS/cygwin_build/install/lib/lib_atlas.dll Debug
cp ../tools/ATLAS/cygwin_build/install/lib/lib_atlas.dll Release

Then build the project with Visual Studio.