Add OpenVINO AI Plugins to Preview Track

[frenchwr]

This merges in the OpenVINO AI plugins to the preview branch. Until recently the plugins only supported GIMP 2.99 and therefore we published the snaps in a dedicated 2.99-openvino branch and track. Now that the plugins support GIMP 3.0 I propose putting them into preview for broader reach.

Note about the 3.0-openvino branch: I created this from the current 2.99-openvino branch, then merged in the preview branch, and finally added a handful of commits for 3.0 support.

I've tested on a few different devices (each with a different generation of Intel Core Ultra CPU) and verified that the plugins all work as expected (including with GPU and NPU acceleration).

[jnsgruk]

Thank you for this!

My only question is whether we should maintain a separate branch for this - I don't know that we want to ship openvino bits to every device, even when they may not support it.

We could go forward with an openvino/* track or similar?

WDYT? Perhaps @merlijn-sebrechts has an opinion?

Keeping it all in the same branch is certainly simpler for us 🤷‍♂️ but I'm not sure what that would like like in the future if we were to integrate toolkits from other vendors?

[frenchwr]

Thank you for this!

My only question is whether we should maintain a separate branch for this - I don't know that we want to ship openvino bits to every device, even when they may not support it.

We could go forward with an openvino/* track or similar?

WDYT? Perhaps @merlijn-sebrechts has an opinion?

Keeping it all in the same branch is certainly simpler for us 🤷‍♂️ but I'm not sure what that would like like in the future if we were to integrate toolkits from other vendors?

My preference is to not use a dedicated branch/track, primarily for broader reach but also to minimize the maintenance cost (with separate tracks someone will need to keep everything in sync, build everything twice, etc).

I also intentionally designed the packaging of the plugins to minimize the maintenance burden to the GIMP snap itself, i.e. I used snapd's content interface to allow the plugins to be maintained and updated independently from GIMP.

The risk of the plugins somehow breaking GIMP I think is also low.

In terms of hardware support, it's true that not all devices will support acceleration available only through Intel NPUs and GPUs; however, I'm publishing the OpenVINO snaps built for both AMD64 and ARM64 (I'm currently enlisting a colleague to test on ARM64) so the coverage for CPU support is fairly large!

That's my two cents - admittedly I'm somewhat biased. :)

[frenchwr]

Heads up: my coworker uncovered a small issue on ARM64 that I'm fixing now. I'll update here when it's done.

[merlijn-sebrechts]

+1 for adding this to the regular snap

[jnsgruk]

Give me a shout when you've had a chance to test the new changes and I'll get this merged - thank you!

[frenchwr]

In terms of hardware support, it's true that not all devices will support acceleration available only through Intel NPUs and GPUs; however, I'm publishing the OpenVINO snaps built for both AMD64 and ARM64 (I'm currently enlisting a colleague to test on ARM64) so the coverage for CPU support is fairly large!

It seems I was a bit too optimistic here. While the OpenVINO runtime supports ARM64, the plugins themselves do not, sadly. In fact, they only support Intel silicon (CPU, GPU, and NPU). We've tested a bit and I'm fairly certain two of the three plugins will run fine on ARM64 or an AMD CPU, but I don't think that's something we want to commit to supporting without testing/validation upstream.

I still think there is a case to including the plugins in preview for the other reasons I originally mentioned. We can control which devices get the new plugins like so:

• ARM64 machines: I'm going to delete the ARM64 releases for openvino-ai-plugins-gimp, so ARM64 machines will never get the plugins.
• non-Intel AMD64 machines: We can ensure that the openvino-ai-plugins-gimp snap never auto-installs by keeping it in beta or not listing it as a default-provider for the content plug in GIMP's snapcraft.yaml. This means users need to intentionally install it. I could make it more clear in the README that the plugins only run on Intel silicon.

[jnsgruk]

You could also use an advanced grammar is a bunch of places to ensure we don't ship bits to arm64 machines...