oneDNN/doc/programming_model/api.md

API

oneDNN has both C and C++ APIs available to users for convenience. There is almost a one-to-one correspondence as far as features are concerned, so users can choose based on language preference and switch back and forth in their projects if they desire. Most of the users choose C++ API though.

The differences are shown in the table below.

Features	C API	C++ API
Minimal standard version	C99	C++11
Functional coverage	Full	May require use of the C API
Error handling	Functions return [status](@ref dnnl_status_t)	Functions throw [exceptions](@ref dnnl::error)
Verbosity	High	Medium
Implementation	Completely inside the library	Header-based thin wrapper around the C API
Purpose	Provide simple API and stable ABI to the library	Improve usability
Target audience	Experienced users, FFI	Most of the users and framework developers

Input validation notes

oneDNN performs limited input validation to minimize the performance overheads. The user application is responsible for sanitizing inputs passed to the library. Examples of the inputs that may result in unexpected consequences:

• Not-a-number (NaN) floating point values
• Large u8 or s8 inputs may lead to accumulator overflow
• While the bf16 16-bit floating point data type has range close to 32-bit floating point data type, there is a significant reduction in precision.

As oneDNN API accepts raw pointers as parameters it's the calling code responsibility to

• Allocate memory and validate the buffer sizes before passing them to the library
• Ensure that the data buffers do not overlap unless the functionality explicitly permits in-place computations

Memory Alignment Requirements

On certain architectures, proper memory alignment is required to maximize efficiency and avoid runtime issues when using oneDNN primitives.

Intel(R) Architecture Processors

No memory alignment requirements.

Intel(R) Processor Graphics and Xe Architecture graphics

For Intel Processor graphics and Xe Architecture graphics, oneDNN requires a minimum memory alignment of 64 bytes, with 128 bytes recommended for optimal performance.

If your use case requires element-wise alignment, as a possible workaround, you can use the reference primitive implementation which provides functional coverage, without performance optimizations. To select the reference implementation, use @ref dnnl::primitive_desc::next_impl API:

auto pd = ...
while (!strstr(pd.impl_info_str(), "ref")) {
    pd.next_impl();
}
// Now pd points to the reference implementation.