Summary

Importing faiss has some undocumented side effects that are indirectly causing a crash on Mac.

Platform

OS: macOS 11.6.4

Faiss version: 1.7.2

Installed from: pip

Running on:

• CPU
• GPU

Interface:

• C++
• Python

Reproduction instructions

This snippet results in a segmentation fault on the last line on Mac:

import faiss
import implicit, scipy
implicit.als.AlternatingLeastSquares().fit(scipy.sparse.csr_matrix(0.5))

The code runs fine if I remove the first line.

System: macOS 11.6.4, 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, CPython 3.10.2 (but the crash also happens on 3.8.12). Faiss installed from faiss_cpu-1.7.2-cp310-cp310-macosx_10_9_x86_64.whl with pip install faiss-cpu.

List of packages installed:

faiss-cpu==1.7.2
implicit==0.6.1
numpy==1.23.2
scipy==1.9.1
tqdm==4.64.1

Questions

1. What are the side effects of running import faiss?
2. Is there a way to create a version of faiss-cpu that doesn't have these side effects?