Bug#878121: OpenBLAS flavors

[Sébastien Villemot]

Dear Frédéric,

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 10:06:55AM +0200, Frédéric Bonnard wrote:

> at the moment there is only one flavor of openblas library package.
> Fedora/RedHat provide several other flavors that are compiled differently :
> 
> RHEL 7.3 :
> $ rpm -qa | grep -i openblas
> openblas-threads-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> openblas-serial64-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> openblas-threads64_-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> openblas-openmp64-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> openblas-openmp64_-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> openblas-devel-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> openblas-threads64-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> openblas-openmp-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> openblas-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> openblas-serial64_-0.2.19-4.el7.ppc64le
> 
> Fedora : https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=970656
> 
> Spec file :
> https://src.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/openblas.git/tree/openblas.spec
> 
> It would be nice if the functionality available across the distros were closer for
> users.
> Especially, in HPC, the greatest need is for (i) reentrant serial version; (ii) OpenMP
> version. There is also need for 32-bit and 64-bit integer arguments.

I think you are conflating two different things here:

- serial vs threads vs OpenMP flavors: it looks to me that those could be
  provided using the existing alternatives mechanism, since they provide the
  same ABI; this issue concerns only OpenBLAS

- 32-bit vs 64-bit: this means providing a different ABI, so it cannot go
  through the existing alternatives system. This is not specific to OpenBLAS,
  since other BLAS/LAPACK implementations could also provide the 64-bit
  integers ABI (at least the reference implem, I'm not sure for ATLAS).

I think both ideas are legitimate and useful, but should clearly be dealt with
separately.

I hope to implement them in a future upload (the first one being easier), but I
don't have an ETA. Of course patches are also welcome.

Best,

-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀  Sébastien Villemot
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Debian Developer
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀  http://sebastien.villemot.name
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀  http://www.debian.org
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