Re: patch to make octave check for ATLAS BLAS libs, etcetera

[Joao Cardoso]

address@hidden wrote:
> 
> Dear Octave Users and Developers,
> 
> I have attached below a patch (made by cvs diff -u against the latest
> source tree) to make Octave check for preexisting/accelerated BLAS and
> LAPACK libraries on the user's system before building its own.  This will

Hi,

Thanks. I (manually) applied your patch and things are really faster.
For medium/large matrices, up to 5/8 times faster.

I had one problem: after `configure' found ATLAS, -latlas etc where
added to LIBS, and after that `configure' fail to compile other generic
test cases, as -lg2c was also needed!? I quicky solve it by forcing LIBS
to have -lg2c.
Perhaps your patch should instead add -latlas etc to FLIBS? I am not a
configure expert!

Also, even if liblapack.so/a does not exists in the system,
libcruft/lapack-xtra is compiled, given multiply defined symbols on
libcruft.so/a creation. The solution is to remove lapack-xtra from the
`AC_OUTPUT(Makefile' list in configure.in.

I merged ATLAS lapack lu() and chol() with netlib LAPACK, but the speed
improvements are only marginal, do you thing it is worth?

I was able to build working shared libraries of ATLAS, but not of netlib
LAPACK... was anyone able to do it (with gcc-2.95.2)?

Thanks,
Joao



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