Re: ATLAS and octave

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Feb-2000, R Clint Whaley <address@hidden> wrote:

| >Here is all I did to build a copy of Octave that uses ATLAS:
| >
| >  1. build ATLAS
| >
| >  2. merge all four of the libraries that the ATLAS build creates into
| >     a single libatlas.a and install it in /some/dir.
| >
| >  3. relink Octave by running
| >
| >       make SPECIAL_MATH_LIB=/some/dir/libatlas.a
| >
| >That seems to be all that is needed.
| 
| That will get you ATLAS's BLAS, but I don't think it will get you ATLAS's
| LU or Cholesky.

For linking, the libraries are listed in the following order:

  liboctinterp.a liboctave.a $(SPECIAL_MATH_LIB) libcruft.a

    * liboctinterp.a is stuff like the parser and interpreter.

    * liboctave.a includes all the C++ interfaces to the numerical routines.

    * $(SPECIAL_MATH_LIB) provides fast blas/lapack stuff, if it is
      referenced by liboctave.a.

    * libcruft.a picks up the rest of the Fortran stuff.

I just ran my copy of Octave that is linked with ATLAS and set a
breakpoint in ATL_doptrf, then ran chol (rand (3)) and it stopped here:

Breakpoint 1, 0x836f070 in ATL_dpotrf () at 
../../../src/octave/liboctave/oct-time.cc:257
257       delete ps;

(I suspect the filename is wrong because ATLAS was not compiled with
-g).

However, one problem with just using

  liboctave.a libatlas.a libcruft.a

is that you may not pick up all of the BLAS from libatlas.a that might
be used by libcruft.a, so really we need to omit all of the blas from
libcruft if we are linking with ATLAS, and then use either

  liboctave.a libatlas.a libcruft.a

or

  liboctave.a libatlas.a libcruft.a libblas.a

in which case libatlas.a doesn't need to contain the blas either...

Thanks,

jwe



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