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Success with the new BLAS (almost)



Dear Debian Toolchain,

I just fiddled around with BLAS a bit (actually, a long time!), and
got down to the following conclusions:

1. Camm's BLAS available from his web page builds fine on my i386.

http://people.debian.org/~camm/blas_1.2-1.dsc

Note that the orig tarball doesn't seem to be accessible; just use the
refblas3 tarball in it's place. So, this seems fine.

2. I tried getting the latest cblas and blas and putting together a
newer blas. The build went fine EXCEPT for one minor issue: I had to
use -ffloat-store. I detail you about it here:

The cblas was downloaded from:

http://www.netlib.org/blas/blast-forum/cblas.tgz

and put in the cblas folder. The other blas files were copied from:

http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lapack-lite-3.1.1.tgz

Next, I merged most of Camm's patches, which were present in
debian/blas.patch. I merged most of them satisfactorily, except the
for the following files, listed here:

cblas/src/cblas_icamax.c: merged in upstream code.
cblas/src/cblas_izamax.c: merged in upstream code.
cblas/src/cblas_isamax.c: merged in upstream code.
cblas/src/cblas_idamax.c: merged in upstream code.
cblas/testing/c_zblas1.c: merged in upstream code.
cblas/testing/c_dblas1.c: merged in upstream code.
src/izamax.f: Couldn't figure out how to merge it.
src/icamax.f: Couldn't figure out how to merge it.
src/dzasum.f: Couldn't figure out how to merge it.

Now, the package builds fine, but the test fails. And the test fails
at an IDENTICAL location to the one discussed here:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.fortran/14320

Of course, I cannot say for sure that the cause is the same here. But
the failure is identical, and the log matches with mine.

Log for failure mentioned on the gfortran list:
http://scratch.biocycle.atmos.colostate.edu/BLAS-gfortran/ouput.txt

The failure happens for other people on other distributions as well,
with gfortran, and is not Debian specific.

After hanging around on #gfortran for a while, a more knowledgeable
person (Andrew Pinksi) just looked and it and told me immediately that
this was GCC PR 323[1], whose workaround is to either use
-ffloat-store, or ignore that test altogether. I chose the former to
build the package. In any case, another person who was helping me, :
Ismail "cartman" Donmez, filed this problem as well, and it was merged
with 323 [2].

My package is available here:
dget -x http://kumar.travisbsd.org/dump/blas_1.2.new-0.1.dsc

Note that the version number etc. is totally wrong, but the aim was
more to build it. Hence the haste. :-) Now, the things I would request
you to do are:

1. Suggest a better version for the package; as both the components
   (CBLAS and BLAS) are new, I would request an upstream version
   increase.

2. Verify that the build passes all tests on all architectures, and
   investigate the -ffloat-store issue.

3. Finish the packaging, and if needed, NMU it to experimental. Do
   note that some documentation may need to be removed first, as the
   previous attempt by Camm was rejected by the FTP master [3].

Hope someone can finish this, so that we can declare BLAS as done, and
proceed to Lapack.

Thanks.

Kumar

[1]: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=323
[2]: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=34616
[3]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-toolchain/2007/11/msg00009.html
-- 
Kumar Appaiah,
458, Jamuna Hostel,
Indian Institute of Technology Madras,
Chennai - 600 036

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