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 November 2017, 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
- For now (20171121), we do not support CUDA. We might add the support again in the future, but for now we do not express any commitment to do so. You can still generate solutions with CUDA, but we do not provide any support and we didn't test if the solutions work or not.
- 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 was validated using MSVC2017. We do not support earlier releases (i.e. MSVC2015 and older). The reason is the C++11 support is still very buggy in the MS compiler.
- We support only openfst-1.6.5 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
Compiling OpenFST
Skip this section, if you have downloaded OpenFST project from https://github.com/kkm000/openfst.git and it already contains openfst.sln file in the root folder. If it is present you can directly open it with Visual Studio 17 and you do not need CMake.
For compilation of OpenFST, you will need CMake installed. Simply go to https://cmake.org/download/ and download and install. Then, in the command line, run the following commands. Be very careful about writing the commands verbatim!
$ git clone https://github.com/kkm000/openfst.git
$ cd openfst
$ mkdir build64
$ cd build64
$ cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" ../
The last command will generate output looking similarly to this. Do not try to read too much into specific versions of the programs.
-- The C compiler identification is MSVC 19.11.25547.0
-- The CXX compiler identification is MSVC 19.11.25547.0
-- Check for working C compiler: C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Community/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.11.25503/bin/Hostx86/x64/cl.exe
-- Check for working C compiler: C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Community/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.11.25503/bin/Hostx86/x64/cl.exe -- works
-- Detecting C compiler ABI info
-- Detecting C compiler ABI info - done
-- Check for working CXX compiler: C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Community/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.11.25503/bin/Hostx86/x64/cl.exe
-- Check for working CXX compiler: C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Community/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.11.25503/bin/Hostx86/x64/cl.exe -- works
-- Detecting CXX compiler ABI info
-- Detecting CXX compiler ABI info - done
-- Detecting CXX compile features
-- Detecting CXX compile features - done
-- The following ICU libraries were not found:
-- data (required)
-- i18n (required)
-- io (required)
-- test (required)
-- tu (required)
-- uc (required)
-- Failed to find all ICU components (missing: ICU_INCLUDE_DIR ICU_LIBRARY _ICU_REQUIRED_LIBS_FOUND)
-- Could NOT find ZLIB (missing: ZLIB_LIBRARY ZLIB_INCLUDE_DIR)
-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: C:/Users/jtrmal/Documents/openfst/build64
In the directory build64
, find the file openfst.sln
and open it using Visual Studio 17.
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!
Compiling Kaldi
Checkout Kaldi trunk, using git from https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi.git
Example:
$ git clone https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi.git kaldi
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.
If using Intel® MKL, install it.
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"!
For now, we do not support CUDA, nor provide any kind of assistance in getting it work. 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.Enter the
(kaldi)/windows
directoryExample:
(kaldi)/$ cd windows (kaldi)/windows $ pwd
Copy
variables.props.dev
tovariables.props
. Then modify the filevariables.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 theMKLDIR
path. No matter what you plan to use, setOPENFST*
variable correctly.For OpenBLAS support, copy the file
kaldiwin_openblas.props
tokaldiwin.props
For MKL support, copy the
kaldiwin_mkl.props
tokaldiwin.props
Call the script that generates the MSVC solution
generate_solution.pl --vsver <default|vs2017|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 15.0 (Visual Studio 2017). Please note that while we support generating the project for Visual Studio 2015, the C++11 support for that compiler is rather sub-par, i.e. it won't probably compile. When choosing Visual Studio 2015, you are on your own!For example, for a build using OpenBLAS and VS 2017 you would run:
(kaldi)/windows$ generate_solution.pl --vsver vs2017 --enable-openblas
Another example, for OpenBLAS, VS 2017 and CUDA support:
(kaldi)/windows$ generate_solution.pl --vsver vs2017 --enable-cuda --enable-openblas
Run the script (kaldi)/windows/get_version.pl:
(kaldi)/windows$ get_version.pl
Open the generated solution that was created in a subfolder (kaldi)/kaldiwin_vs 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
. The tests will fail to compile too -- this is because of deficiency of the script generatesolution.pl. We might fix it later on.
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.