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

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Tuesday, 13 September 2005 at 20:17, Quentin Spencer wrote:
> 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.

> 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).

I agree, but I thought the point of atlas was to provide libs only
for those CPUs with SSE/3DNow. If that's not the case, then what's
their advantage over BLAS?

> 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

How about
atlas.i386
atlas-devel.i386
atlas-devel.pentium3
atlas-devel.pentium4
atlas-devel.athlon
instead? The last three would be, as I proposed earlier, %ifarch'd in the
spec, so this would need to be built with
--target i386 to get the first two
and with
--target pentium3, pentium4 and athlon to get the rest

I think it's cleaner that way and doesn't require the user to know
whether or not his CPU supports SSE2 instructions. It also prevents
him from installing the wrong package accidentally.

R.

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