A.5. Summary

Whether you’re building software or hardware, the first order of business is to know your tools. In the case of OpenCL development, the tools are conveniently provided through freely available SDKs. The more time you spend understanding how these SDKs work, the less time you’ll spend dealing with strange linking and compiling errors.

To make use of AMD’s and Nvidia’s SDKs, you need to understand the OpenCL library hierarchy. Every OpenCL application needs to link to a library containing OpenCL’s standard functions. This library is called OpenCL.dll on Windows, libOpenCL.so on Linux, and OpenCL on Mac OS systems. If your development process uses makefiles, your makefile must identify the name and location of the OpenCL library.