Installing on Alpine Linux (3.20+)¶

Alpine builds a CPU-only VMAFx: Alpine uses musl libc, which the CUDA and Intel oneAPI toolchains do not support. Run the setup script from the repository root, then build (scripts/setup/alpine.sh).

Setup script¶

bash scripts/setup/alpine.sh                       # CPU build dependencies and linters
INSTALL_LINTERS=false bash scripts/setup/alpine.sh # skip shellcheck, shfmt and the Python linters

ENABLE_CUDA=true or ENABLE_SYCL=true stops the script with an error and points to the Ubuntu, Fedora or Arch setup.

Manual install¶

apk add --no-cache \
    build-base clang clang-extra-tools cppcheck \
    meson ninja nasm pkgconf \
    python3 py3-pip py3-virtualenv \
    doxygen

Build¶

From the repository root:

meson setup build core -Denable_cuda=false -Denable_sycl=false
ninja -C build

The binary is build/tools/vmaf.

Why Alpine¶

A musl build is a portability check: if libvmaf compiles and passes its tests under musl, the code does not depend on glibc-specific behaviour. No CI job runs it; run it by hand in an alpine container when a change touches platform code.