Review Re-Request: ATLAS, a fast implementation of BLAS and LAPACK

Quentin Spencer qspencer at ieee.org
Tue Sep 13 18:17:00 UTC 2005


Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:

>On Monday, 12 September 2005 at 20:42, Quentin Spencer wrote:
>  
>
>>This has been waiting for review for a while, but I just revised the 
>>package, so I thought I'd send a new notice. The request for review is 
>>Bugzilla number 166871. The spec and SRPM can be found at 
>>http://webpages.charter.net/qspencer/rpm/
>>
>>Note that this one can take a long time to compile, especially on i386, 
>>because it makes subpackages for sse, sse2, and 3dnow. It also has a 
>>custom compilation option that can build libraries that enable the 
>>compile-time optimizations to create libraries for a specific hardware 
>>configuration--see the spec file and documentation.
>>    
>>
>
>I think the 3DNow-optimized binary could be %ifarch'd athlon
>and SSE could be default for pentium3[1], SSE2 for pentium4[1].
>I don't think there's any point in providing an i386 package.
>
>[1] at least for FC4. For FC3 there's a problem with lack of pentium3
>and pentium4 arches in RPM.
>
>Regards,
>R.
>
>  
>

The point in providing an i386 package is that we don't know what 
hardware people are running FC4 on, and it is unacceptable for the 
package to simply not work on pre-SSE processors (I still have a Pentium 
233 which I run Fedora on). Furthermore, the base i386 architecture is 
the only one on which shared libraries can currently be compiled with 
GCC4 (The maintainer is aware of the problem, but a fix might not be). 
So compiling the package on i386 creates the following packages:
atlas
atlas-devel
atlas-sse-devel
atlas-sse2-devel
atlas-3dnow-devel

Anyone who installs atlas on a i386 machine will get shared libaries 
that exceed the performance of base BLAS, but may not be optimal. Anyone 
who desires extensions for their architecture can install the 
appropriate devel package and statically link their program. Eventually 
when the shared library problem is fixed (it's caused by assembly 
kernels that conflict with the -fPIC flag), someone should be able to 
yum install atlas-sse or atlas-sse2 and get better performance than with 
just atlas.

-Quentin




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