What is ‘target’ in TVM?

[areusch]

@sho

@areusch

When used in tvm.relay.build, it does describe the deployment environment, but it’s described through the lens of “which codegen should we use to build for this environment?” Therefore it’s currently possible to describe environments using multiple different target strings.

This makes sense. Thank you for making it clear. I saw some examples of specifying “llvm” and “c” as target. How can users know the options?

I believe with tvmc --help you can discover them. They are also listed in target_kind.cc.

@sho

If you just go though this: Install from Source — tvm 0.21.dev0 documentation you build TVM and runtime by LLVM. Then you start your tutorial to compile the models.

Ah I see. Yeah that is confusing–there are two runtimes: the C++ runtime and C runtime. The C runtime is what you use with microTVM. You have to build the C++ runtime to build the TVM compiler. So you shouldn’t consider this Getting Started step as compiling item #2 (runtime components) for the purposes of running on your microcontroller.

@sho

you mean, apart from the above process, you can build the runtime separately by your compiler?

yep