[R-sig-Fedora] Heads up - symlinked GotoBLAS in F14

[Roger Bivand]

On Mon, 8 Nov 2010, Gavin Simpson wrote:

> On Mon, 2010-11-08 at 08:54 +0100, Roger Bivand wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I installed F14 on release, but was diquieted to note that my symlinked
>> GotoBLAS (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html#Shared-BLAS,
>> foot of paragraph) prevented R (compiled from source, no special configure
>> options) from loading - everything had been fine on F < 14. It seems that:
>>
>> cat /selinux/booleans/allow_execstack
>>
>> is 1 1 on my RHEL systems, but became (?) 0 0 in F14. Could anyone with
>> F < 14 check its value there?
>
> It is 1 1 on both my F13 and F12 boxes (Time to upgrade at least one of
> those I guess...) but I haven't used any BLAS other than the one
> supplied in the R sources.

Thanks. So the SELinux policy on this changed for F14, and likely will 
change for RHEL 6. Using GotoBLAS isn't necessary and doesn't help in many 
settings, where the standard R BLAS is absolutely OK. But for larger 
matrices on multicore machines, it can make things go faster when the 
conditions are right, because it can share the operation across cores.

Roger

>
> HTH
>
> G
>
>> The "fix" on F14 is:
>>
>> System -> Administration -> SELinux Management -> (root password, wait),
>> then Boolean -> global | allow_execstack | Allow unconfirmed executables
>> to make their stack executable [tick]
>>
>> The comments suggest that this is not a good policy! Following the
>> adjustment, the booleans are 1 1, and R loads with symlinked GotoBLAS on
>> F14.
>>
>> Roger
>>
>
>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no