[R-sig-Fedora] R with external BLAS fails regression test

[Martyn Plummer]

On Mon, 2014-07-07 at 10:09 -0400, Tom Callaway wrote:
> On 07/07/2014 08:15 AM, Martyn Plummer wrote:
> > Dear Tom,
> > 
> > The change in the Fedora RPM from using R's internal BLAS to external
> > BLAS means the Fedora R binary now fails one of R's regression tests,
> > specifically: tests/reg-BLAS.R. You can run this code by hand to verify
> > the issue.
> > 
> > As noted in the R administration and Installation Manual, "R relies on
> > ISO/IEC 60559 compliance of an external BLAS. This can be broken if for
> > example the code assumes that terms with a zero factor are always zero
> > and do not need to be computed - whereas x*0 can be NaN. This is checked
> > in the test suite."
> > 
> > The version of BLAS that comes with R contains patched versions of
> > DGBMV, DGEMM, and DGEMV.  The patch has been in place since 2010.
> > Presumably R blas and reference BLAS have been divergent ever since.
> > 
> > I guess this should be reported upstream as a BLAS bug. Recalling the
> > previous thread on openblas, I note that openblas does pass the
> > regression test.
> 
> Seems like it. In the interim, is there a patch handy, or do I need to
> try to untangle it from the R code?

I have reconstructed a patch (attached) that you can apply directly to
the BLAS source code from Netlib.

Martyn

> ~tom
> 
> ==
> ¸.·´¯`·.´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸><(((º> OSAS @ Red Hat
> University Outreach || Fedora Special Projects || Fedora Legal



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