Re: how do I access f77 libraries on linux (for lapack and blas)? [REALLY SOLVED]

From: Aaron Sloman (A.Sloman_at_cs.bham.ac.uk)
Date: 12/25/04

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    Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2004 01:11:51 +0000 (UTC)

    My previous announcement of a fix was premature. The problem is now
    really solved.

    Some time ago I mentioned difficulty using the latest additions to David
    Young's 'popvision' extension to Pop11.

    He had introduced Pop11 libraries that invoked the powerful BLAS and
    LAPACK fortran libraries. This allowed a wide range of mathematical
    procedures to be conveniently accessed interactively in pop11, in a
    similar way to Matlab, though with the extra generality of the pop11
    language (which is similar in power to Lisp.)

    However, some of the LAPACK procedures failed to access BLAS procedures,
    causing 'undefined symbol' errors.

    Various people make suggestions, and then I thought the problem had been
    solved by getting new libraries. I wrote, prematurely, on Thu, 23 Dec
    2004:

    > This problem is now solved using the latest lapack and blas rpms.

    The problem disappeared after installing new versions of blas, and
    lapack along with blas-devel, lapack-devel, and libg2c libraries.

    Somehow that enabled me to use David's packages.

    However, thanks to further investigations and help from David Young and
    Jeff Best I found that there was a bug in the linux version of Poplog's
    mechanisms for linking in dynamic libraries: a bit was not set in one
    of the control flags which would have made symbols 'global'. This bit
    was set properly in Solaris poplog which is why the Lapack extensions
    had worked on Suns.

    After linux poplog was rebuilt with the dynamic linking bug fixed, it
    turned out that the new blas and lapack libraries were not required
    after all, since the lapack extension to pop11 worked on machines
    running Redhat 8 and 9 that had not had the latest blas and lapack
    libraries installed.

    I.e. installing the new libraries (including the -devel versions)
    was merely a 'workaround' rather than a fix to the basic cause of the
    problem.

    The latest version of linux poplog, incorporating this dynamic linking
    fix can now be fetched from

        http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html

        http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/bham-linux-poplog.tar.gz

    The 'News' section of the former file mentiones other recent
    developments, including reduction in size of the bham-linux-poplog tar
    file from about 21 Mbytes to about 19Mbytes, and provision of a script
    for checking a PC linux system to see if meets the main requirements
    for installing Poplog. (If run as root it can install missing symbolic
    links in /usr/X11R6/lib/ )

    Apologies for the red-herrings and premature announcement!

    Thanks to all who offered suggestions regarding the dynamic linking
    problem and seasonal greetings.

    Aaron
    ====
    Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
    PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/ (also talks in /talks )
    FREE BOOK: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/crp/
    FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/packages/simagent.html

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