[Discuss-gnuradio] volk build issues on MinGW

[Don Ward]

Several minor issues and one major issue were encountered in building the 
volk library on MinGW.  The minor issues are:

(1) The use of symbolic links for volk/config.{sub,guess} is a problem.  I 
used a Cygwin version of git that produced Cygwin symlinks, which are 
unusable in MinGW.  A version of git exists for MSYS, but I'm not sure it 
handles symbolic links.  Is it possible to avoid using symbolic links in the 
git repository?

(2) configure fails while testing for -lboost_unit_test_framework because
of the presence of  "-Wl,--enable-runtime-pseudo-reloc" in LDFLAGS.  I'm not
sure why it is a problem, but I don't think these flags are needed at all in 
this situation.  (Note:  Cygwin had the same problem, and the solution used 
there also works for MinGW.)

(3) volk/lib/testqa.cc requires the boost unit_test library.  This needs to 
be documented.

(4) boost/test/unit_test.hpp not found in volk/lib/testqa.cc:  I think we 
need to include $(BOOST_CPPFLAGS) in testqa_CPPFLAGS in 
volk/lib/Makefile.am.

A big problem is that posix_memalign (used in the volk test program) will 
never run on Windows.  Given that aligned memory will be needed to use volk, 
this becomes a major issue that will need to be addressed for future 
development of GNU Radio.  I will have further comment on this issue in a 
separate thread.

-- Don W.