Re: QUERY: what is status/recommendations for Octave + ATLAS compilation

[stevenj]

On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Ben Sapp wrote:
> I would prefer the current system being the default and having a
> --enable-atlas option to configure as well.  I do not want to have to
> build atlas every time I build Octave.(Which is quite often)  I would
> also like the option of using vendor supplied blas... but, that is
> another issue.  

The patch I posted also supports looking for various vendor BLAS
implementations, e.g. the IBM ESSL library or DEC/Compaq DXML/CXML.

My patch uses --with-fastblas or --without-fastblas to turn support for
user-installed, accelerated BLAS libraries on and off (the patch I posted
does --with-fastblas by default, which means it uses e.g. ATLAS
automatically if the latter found, although this could easily be changed).
You can also use --with-fastblas=<lib> to link to a specific BLAS library
-l<lib>.

Steven

PS. JWE mentioned having an option to use the ATLAS from a previous build
if you wanted to compile a new version.  Note that this would require
keeping the old build tree around, or at least the ATLAS part, instead of
being able to rely on installed libraries.  Most people delete the build
tree after they install something, especially since the ATLAS and the new
LAPACK 3.0 build trees are huge these days, not to mention Octave's 140
MB.  Okay, you could set things up so that users could just save e.g.
libcruft.a, but that still means that users have to dig around the guts of
the build tree, and would mean adding kludges to the Makefiles.



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