Dear all,

I am currently trying to link R 2.1.0 to the GOTO BLAS 0.99.3 library on
a box running Fedora Core 3 , basically following the steps indicated in
the R-Admin document:

1: I downloaded the current libgoto.xxx.so from
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kgoto/libraries/libgoto_prescott-32-r0.99-3.so.gz,
a version suitable for our XEON machine (Nocona core), unpacked it to
/usr/lib and created a symlink libgoto.so pointing to the library.

2: Then, I got ready to re-configure and re-compile R (2.1.0) using the
following configure flags: ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-R-shlib
--enable-shared --with-tcltk --with-blas="-lgoto -lpthread -lm"

I did read the R-Admin doc and therefore I am aware of the fact that
passing "-lgoto" is supposed to be sufficient, but as a matter of fact
configuring with --with-blas="-lgoto" only ends up in a libR.so being
linked to the standard libblas.so. config.log reports in this settings
that libgoto.xxx.so is missing links to libpthread etc. Therefore, I
added the two flags "-lpthread -lm" as indicated at GOTO's website and I
got a clean configure run. (Am I concluding correctly that I am using a
threaded version of goto blas?)

3: Running make, however, freezed when trying to build "grDevices",
without throwing any warning or error messages:

[...]
../../../../library/grDevices/libs/grDevices.so is unchanged
make[5]: Leaving directory
`/home/ssoberni/R-2.1.0/src/library/grDevices/src'
make[4]: Leaving directory
`/home/ssoberni/R-2.1.0/src/library/grDevices/src'
[freeze]

4: I then rummaged the R mailing list archives and stumbled over a
thread dating from May this year pointing to a similar issue, concerning
gcc-3.4 and broken lapack libraries provided by FC3 (see
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2005-May/033117.html).

Following these opinions/ findings, I did the following (though I knew
that -- in principle -- R is supposed to handle this issue by passing a
--ffloat-store flag to the fortran compiler, doesn't it?):

* I wanted to remove the FC3 native lapack libraries, and to my
surprise, they were not installed at all (no liblapack.so.xxx in /usr/lib).
* I set up an older gcc environment, i.e. the last release from the
3.3.x family (3.3.6) and tried to recompile R ending up with the same
hang-up.

As a last step, I tried to exclude R's internal package explicitly by
setting --wihtout-lapack, which did not hava a visible effect on the
building process and did not provide a workaround for the hang-up.

Please, I highly appreciate any thoughts or hints as my colleagues and I
are eager to get into GOTO's universe.

//stefan

-- 

Stefan Sobernig
Department of Information Systems and New Media
Vienna University of Economics	
Augasse 2-6
A - 1090 Vienna
     
Phone: +43 - 1 - 31336 - 4878
Fax: +43 - 1 - 31336 - 746     
Email: stefan.sobernig@wu-wien.ac.at <mailto:stefan.sobernig@wu-wien.ac.at>
PubKey: http://julia.wu-wien.ac.at/~ssoberni/0x5FC2D3FA.asc <http://julia.wu-wien.ac.at/%7Essoberni/0x5FC2D3FA.asc>
 


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]


