On Sep 30, 2020, at 03:32, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>
On 29/09/2020 12:27, Kasper Daniel Hansen wrote:
To use veclib you need
--with-blas="-framework Accelerate"
Details are in the R-admin manual, including that R fails one of its
Simon's calling this vecLib is a bit misleading. 'vecLib' was a
vectorized library for PPC Macs, and the name lives on for a small part of
the Accelerate framework. The part that supplies an enhanced BLAS is
different, and is based on ATLAS for x86_64 CPUs.
This is just the way Apple names it (now on all platforms), the name has a
long history and was related to PPC, but Apple chose not to change it even
though it doesn't actually contain any PowerPC code anymore. Accelerate is
just a stub that combines vecLib and vImage, and since R only uses vecLib
it is sufficient to link to vecLib. I'm just referring to the actual
framework involved and the vecLib framework itself contains all the
libraries including LAPACK and BLAS (
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/veclib ).
Cheers,
Simon
Incidentally, on the configuration issue -- had you followed the posting
guide and either read the current manual or tried R-patched you would not
have encountered the problem (which AFAWK is very recent, from the Command
Line Tools for Xcode 12, released only for rather recent versions of
Catalina and pre-Big Sur about 10 days ago). Now documented at
On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 9:53 AM roy <rollinforall at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Simon,
Thanks for the info. I was totally unaware of ABI, vecLib, etc and
Apple has blas, lapack, etc. But after reading up on this and
your email, I'm beginning to understand more about this.
So, I would like to first checkout vecLib. From what you say, would I
to do something like the following?
./configure --enable-BLAS-shlib --with-blas="-lBLAS" ...
Is this also possible with LAPACK?
tx again.
cheers, roy
On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 3:01 PM Simon Urbanek <
simon.urbanek at r-project.org
Rollin,
it has been several years since I last tested MKL, so take it with a
of salt, but in general you don't necessarily have to build R with
order to use it - you only need to use --enable-BLAS-shlib and link to
ABI-compatible BLAS which can be vecLib as well. Then you can change
link from vecLib to MKL in the BLAS stub. Note that we only need the C
there are wrappers vecLibg95f.* which re-map the F entry points to C
points as to avoid Fortran ABI issues thus you don't care about the
Fortran. However, historically, MKL has not been much more performant
vecLib so it's unclear if it is worth the hassle. As with any
BLAS, note that this may have effects on results in R.
Cheers,
Simon
On 28/09/2020, at 7:07 PM, rollin <rollinforall at gmail.com> wrote:
I wanted to build R from source on macos (10.15.5) so I could include
Intel's MKL. So I first looked at building R from source without
From the installation doc, I modified config.site to have the
CC=clang
OBJC=$CC
FC=/usr/local/bin/gfortran
CXX=clang++
I then ran configuration via the command:
./configure -C --enable-R-shlib --enable-memory-profiling
--x-includes=/opt/X11/include --x-libraries=/opt/X11/lib
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig
And received the following information and error:
checking if bzip2 version >= 1.0.6... no
checking whether bzip2 support suffices... configure: error: bzip2
and headers are required
By looking at the log, I saw a compiler error due to an implicit
I then made the following change in config.site:
CFLAGS='-Wno-implicit-function-declaration -g -O2''
And configure now ran without errors.
However, when I looked at configuring to use MKL, I discovered that
macos does not support gnu fortran so, unless I purchase Intel's
compiler, it looks like I'm sol.
Has anyone built R with MKL on macos (10.15)? In any event, I wanted
least note the issue and work around I encountered when building R on
macos with clang/xcode.
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