Re: More on binary packages and FFTW/ATLAS

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Feb-2004, Dmitri A. Sergatskov <address@hidden> wrote:

| Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| > On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 12:21:12PM -0600, Quentin Spencer wrote:
| 
| >>optimizations, while the rest of the binary code is generic, but ATLAS
| >>does some compile-time optimizations. How has this been handled in the
| >>past for the other binary distributions (Debian, Windows, or OSX)?
| > 
| > 
| > On Debian, Camm has put a lot of work in for architecture-specific packages:
| > 
| 
| What perhaps is more important is that he made ATLAS into shared library.
| 
| That is also how Matlab handles the situation (it shipped with few 
pre-compiled
| atlas.so libraries and does CPU detection on startup).

We could do something similar, where Octave would not actually be
linked with a Lapack or Blas library, but would dlopen them and look
up functions as needed (or at startup, to fill in a table) and then
call the linear algebra functions via pointers.  This way, it would be
easy to switch from one linear algebra package to another, perhaps
even at run time if you really wanted to do that.  Should we make a
change like this?

jwe



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