Release tracker - 2024/09

[ScottTodd]

Overview

Our previous stable release was cut on 2024-08-28: https://github.com/iree-org/iree/releases/tag/candidate-20240828.999. We aim for roughly one stable release per month. This issue tracks the release process for the next release.

Release process docs:

• https://iree.dev/developers/general/release-management/
• https://github.com/iree-org/iree/blob/main/RELEASING.md

Release checklist:

• Watch for major/breaking changes and decide to either batch them with this release or defer them until the next release
• Choose a release candidate from nightly releases to promote. The candidate should contain no major regressions and should include all packages, even those marked experimental in .github/workflows/build_package.yml like macOS and Windows packages.
• Compile release notes
• Promote to stable (on GitHub) and push packages to PyPI
• Roll forward downstream packages like iree-turbine and push similar package updates to PyPI
• Update release process docs for next time

Release notes

Commit range

• Previous release to main: candidate-20240828.999...main
• Previous release to release candidate: candidate-20240828.999...candidate-20241104.1068

(Contributors can edit this section as they land patches)

---

Announcements:

• We plan on switching from our current version scheme (e.g. 20241104.1068) to a new version scheme (e.g. 3.0.1) with the next release. See [RFC] New versioning scheme for IREE Python packages #18938 for full details

Major changes:

• Python 3.13 is now supported.
• Support for ONNX operations and models continues to grow.
• The CMake IREE_TARGET_BACKEND_CUDA, IREE_HAL_DRIVER_CUDA, IREE_TARGET_BACKEND_ROCM, and IREE_HAL_DRIVER_HIP options now default to OFF: f2bf602
• CUDA support is now included in published aarch64 packages: 3dda3cd
• Indirect command buffers are now enabled by default: a730349
  • --iree-hal-memoization=true
  • --iree-hal-indirect-command-buffers=true
• The --iree-codegen-*-transform-dialect-jit flags have been off by default for a while and were removed across all backends: 012f8a6
• A warning is now issued when the --iree-llvmcpu-target-cpu= or --iree-llvmcpu-target-cpu-features flags are unset, since the default of "generic" is slow. These flags will be required in the future: 0c6a151
• The ROCm and CUDA compiler targets now support executable linking: 49ffdac
• Support for more data types, including 8-bit floats is improving: 2291b38
• The compiler is now better able to optimize sequences of arithmetic operations common in ML frameworks like PyTorch: 0f28d44
• GitHub Actions workflows are using a new cluster of self-hosted runners: c3cbfbd, cc891ba
• The legacy ireec console script has been removed in favor of iree-compile: 84d0789

In development features:

• Support for data-tiling on GPU targets is in progress.
• A new iree.build package is being developed to help construct model compilation pipelines: 0077358

Full changelog: candidate-20240828.999...candidate-20241104.1068

---

[ScottTodd]

We are planning to change version schemes with #18938 , so I'd like to cut a stable release soon, ahead of that change. That will get us one last release on the current version scheme and then the new version scheme rollout will be less of a lift for users to adapt to.

CI and release builds from the last few days/weeks seem relatively stable, so I may pick a recent release arbitrarily, unless anyone has specific recommendations or concerns.

[ScottTodd]

I propose we promote https://github.com/iree-org/iree/releases/tag/candidate-20241104.1068 from yesterday. We've noticed a few downstream changes needed to adapt to the very latest nightly due to fa3a144 (changing the signature of iree_hal_device_queue_execute).

[ScottTodd]

• Promoted that candidate to stable on GitHub
• Pushed packages to PyPI for iree-compiler, iree-runtime, iree-tools-tf, and iree-tools-tflite
  • The push failed for the x86 and aarch64 iree-compile wheel files for Python 3.9 since we just went past the 10GB storage limit per PyPI project. As we'll be creating new projects and we aren't seeing that much usage of Python 3.9 I'm comfortable letting that sit as-is
• Working on updating iree-turbine. Ran into some test failures on Bump iree-requirements-ci.txt to the latest stable release. iree-turbine#254 that need resolving, then I also want to go through and update the version file and release process docs in that repo before building a package and pushing to PyPI

[ScottTodd]

I published a new release of iree-turbine as well: https://github.com/iree-org/iree-turbine/releases/tag/v2.5.0 and https://pypi.org/project/iree-turbine/#history. Calling this complete.