Building Meshroom from source to use SYCL over CUDA (AMD GPU suport)

[unfa]

Hi!

I am very excited to see that SYCL (non-CUDA, GPU acceleration) has been merged to AliceVision. This is a historical development, because up until now to do photogrammetry at a reasonable level of fidelity and performance it was either necessary to be a computer wizard, use proprietary software or remote services or have an Nvidia GPU with CUDA support.

This is the PR in question:

https://github.com/alicevision/AliceVision/pull/2077

With this being merged, the dreaded Nvidia vendor lock-in is finally lifted, but Meshroom have not had a stable release since, and the development builds I have tried so far have not worked for me.

I have tried Github development build:

https://github.com/alicevision/AliceVision/releases/tag/nightly

It is incomplete, Meshroom *technically* runs but only shows the launcher and is unable to open or create any projects. Maybe CI doesn't check any further and this is passed as "working" but it is not usable in that state. Maybe there's some undocumented procedure needed to get this to be functional - if so please fill me in.

I have downloaded latest development Docker image from
https://hub.docker.com/r/alicevision/alicevision
As in some documentation there's stated that one can extract the software from the image.
I have no idea how to do that, running the container only shows me an Nvidia license agreement and quits. Ironic, since I am doing this to get away from Nvidia in the first place...

Numerous build attempts from myself and a friend who's intimately familiar with CUDA have failed. We tried to get aliceVision_depthMapEstimation to work with ZLUDA, but this failed when process tried to reserve memory on the GPU, as the ZLUDA GPU failed to report the amount of free memory, so reserving buffers was impossible. We spent days on this and got nowhere. So close, yet so far away...

Trying to build Meshroom on Arch Linux we managed to completely break the system (I can't log into a graphical KDE session due to some library problems with Qt) - that's unrelated, but maybe shows our dedication to get this working...


I have made another attempt to build Meshroom using a VM (VirtualBox).
I could not find information about what build OS is best to use. So I picked Ubuntu Server 2026.04 LTS as downloaded from Cannonical:
https://ubuntu.com/download/server/thank-you?version=26.04&architecture=amd64&lts=true

So far I think the main problem with building Meshroom is lacking documentation and undefined ideal build environment.

Instructions are missing steps to installing numerous build dependancies which are not pulled automatically from git (--recursive) and require user research.

I have encountered a problem where system-provided version of OpenImageIO is 2.5, and Meshroom requires 3.0 or newer. I have cheated and changed the CMakeLists.txt file because I was unable to get this satisfied - documentation says nothing about this unfortunately...

After many hours I got completely stuck on CoinUtils.

I have installed coinor-libcoinutils-dev but CMake does not see it:

I have used fzf to try and locate the CoinUtilsConfig.cmake or coinutils-config.cmake files to no avail. I have built CoinUtils from source but still can't find these files anywhere...

Could someone help me figure this out please?

Thank you for making Meshroom - it's an incredible tool for artists and researchers.
- unfa

[Tobiasz Karoń]

Allright, so reading through the docs once more I realized there's a list of dependancies and some of them were forked to add CMake building. So I went out and got CoinUtils build and installed.

Next is Clp, but it depends on something called OsiConfig, which I could not find anywhere on the internet or Ubuntu's repositories.

So that seems like a dead end.

Next I read again that the recommendation fro Linux is to build with dependancies included, so I added build flag that enables that and tried again - still a failure, this time a program called BISON is missing.

I've run out of time for the day by that point.

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- Tobiasz 'unfa' Karoń

www.youtube.com/unfa000

[Fabien Castan]

Hi Unfa,

Thanks for contacting us and for providing precise information.
You're correct that the nightly build is not yet finalized, and it does not currently include SYCL support.
The issues you're encountering stem from the fact that you're ahead of where we are in the release process. We have already tested and evaluated the SYCL branch locally, but we have not yet completed the Docker image to include SYCL.
Using Docker would be the most straightforward approach, as all other dependencies are already handled there. It would also be extremely valuable for the project if you still have the time and energy to help test within the Docker environment.
This is the same Docker image that we use to build and publish our official releases.

Best,

Fabien CASTAN

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[erfto1]

Hello, i've also tried to get the nightly build to run with no success, since for you Meshroom didn't load nodes at all you should try making a folder  named AliceVision in Meshroom folder and extract Alicevision into that as this is likely caused by Meshroom being unable to find Alicevision. After doing this the nodes show up but they didn't work for me giving import errors in the console.

As for Zluda, only the old version fork works with Meshroom 2023 version. The new zluda repo is a rewrite and doesn't support Meshroom yet.

I could test within the Docker environment but i don't know if SYCL backend is working now or if it's not finished yet, do i need to manually build? 

Thank you.

25 Haziran 2026 Perşembe tarihinde saat 17:47:45 UTC+3 itibarıyla Fabien Castan şunları yazdı: