Re: BLAS/LAPACK implementations
Hello Adam,
On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 08:39:50AM -0500, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Some time ago, the netlib and ATLAS implementations of BLAS and LAPACK
> were ABI-compatible, and used alternatives symlinks to access their
> different libraries with the same ABI.
>
> I don't know when it happened, but at some point they diverged, and now
> the netlib packages have libblas-3gf.so and liblapackgf-3.so, and ATLAS
> has libblas-3.so and liblapack-3.so.
If I remember correctly, that renaming was due to the compiler-update
from g77 to gfortran (which are NOT ABI-compatible!): Packages whose
names end with "gf" are supposed to be compiled and linked with
gfortran, while the older ones use g77. As this was a release goal for
Lenny, it should be finished by now - and also atlas should use now
gfortran, thus being again ABI-compatible with BLAS.
>
> I know that ATLAS has its own API as well, but it was nice back in the
> day to be able to build to the netlib API, and then swap them back at
> forth at runtime using update-alternatives.
>
> Are they no longer ABI-compatible? Is it possible to get back to the
> old state of things?
Did you try to install the package "libatlas3gf-base"? Last time I checked
it on my machine (squeeze), it was no problem to switch between netlib
and atlas withour recompiling: just changing LD_LIBRARY_PATH to link to
the netlib-versions did the trick. And I have
/usr/lib/atlas/libblas.so.3gf which belongs to the package
"libatlas3gf-base".
HTH,
Axel
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