Details:
- Added Perl to list of prerequisites for building BLIS. This is in part
(and perhaps completely?) due to some substitution commands used at
the end of configure that include '\n' characters that are not
properly interpreted by the version of sed included on some versions
of OS X. This new documentation addresses issue #398.
Details:
- Inserted brief disclaimers about default disabled multithreading
and default single-threadedness to BuildSystem.md along with links to
the Multithreading.md document. Thanks to Jeff Diamond for suggesting
these additions.
- Trivial reword of sentence regarding automatically-detected
architectures.
Details:
- Changed the default installation prefix from $HOME/lib to /usr/local.
- Modified the way configure internally handles the prefix, libdir,
includedir, and sharedir (and also added an --exec-prefix option).
The defaults to these variables are set as follows:
prefix: /usr/local
exec_prefix: ${prefix}
libdir: ${exec_prefix}/lib
includedir: ${prefix}/include
sharedir: ${prefix}/share
The key change, aside from the addition of exec_prefix and its use to
define the default to libdir, is that the variables are substituted
into config.mk with quoting that delays evaluation, meaning the
substituted values may contain unevaluated references to other
variables (namely, ${prefix} and ${exec_prefix}). This more closely
follows GNU conventions, including those used by GNU autoconf, and
also allows make to override any one of the variables *after*
configure has already been run (e.g. during 'make install').
- Updates to build/config.mk.in pursuant to above changes.
- Updates to output of 'configure --help' pursuant to above changes.
- Updated docs/BuildSystem.md to reflect the new default installation
prefix, as well as mention EXECPREFIX and SHAREDIR.
- Changed the definitions of the UNINSTALL_OLD_* variables in the
top-level Makefile to use $(wildcard ...) instead of 'find'. This
was motivated by the new way of handling prefix and friends, which
leads to the 'find' command being run on /usr/local (by default),
which can take a while almost never yielding any benefit (since the
user will very rarely use the uninstall-old targets).
- Removed periods from the end of descriptive output statements (i.e.,
non-verbose output) since those statements often end with file or
directory paths, which get confusing to read when puctuated by a
period.
- Trival change to 'make showconfig' output.
- Removed my name from 'configure --help'. (Many have contributed to it
over the years.)
- In configure script, changed the default state of threading_model
variable from 'no' to 'off' to match that of debug_type, where there
are similarly more than two valid states. ('no' is still accepted
if given via the --enable-debug= option, though it will be
standardized to 'off' prior to config.mk being written out.)
- Minor variable name change in flatten-headers.py that was intended for
32812ff.
- CREDITS file update.
Details:
- Modified bli_blas.h so that:
- By default, if the BLAS layer is enabled at configure-time, BLAS
prototypes are also enabled within blis.h;
- But if the user #defines BLIS_DISABLE_BLAS_DEFS prior to including
blis.h, BLAS prototypes are skipped over entirely so that, for
example, the application or some other header pulled in by the
application may prototype the BLAS functions without causing any
duplication.
- Updated docs/BuildSystem.md to document the feature above, and
related text.
Details:
- Relax version blacklisting of python3 to allow 3.4 or later instead
of 3.5 or later. Thanks to Dave Love for pointing out that 3.4 was
sufficient for the purpose of BLIS's build system. (It should be
noted that we're not sure which, if any, python3 versions prior to
3.4 are insufficient, and that the only thing stopping us from
determining this is the fact that these earlier versions of python3
are not readily available for us to test with.)
- Updated docs/BuildSystem.md to be explicit about current python2 vs
python3 version requirements.
Details:
- Modified .travis.yml to automatically employ the simulation of
application-level threading within the testsuite, with supporting
changes to common.mk, the top-level Makefile, and
travis/do_testsuite.sh.
- Added a new pair of input files to testsuite directory with the
'.salt' suffix (similar to those with the '.fast' suffix) for
testing application-level threading.
- Updated docs/BuildSystem.md to document the new make targets
'testblis-salt' and 'checkblis-salt'.
Details:
- Modified .travis.yml to automatically test the mixed-datatype support
of the gemm operation, with supporting changes to common.mk, the
top-level Makefile, and travis/do_testsuite.sh.
- Added a new pair of input files to testsuite directory with the
'.mixed' suffix (similar to those with the '.fast' suffix) for testing
mixed-datatype gemm.
- Updated docs/BuildSystem.md to document the new make targets
'testblis-md' and 'checkblis-md'.
Details:
- Added python version checking to configure script. (Recall that python
is needed to execute the flatten-headers.py script.) Minimum versions
of python needed are currently as follows:
python2: 2.7 or later
python3: 3.5 or later
The standard search order for python interpeters is:
python python3 python2
The PYTHON environment variable is also supported and will be checked
before the standard search order list.
- Updated BuildSystem.md to include: a minimum make version; mention
that the C compiler must actually be a C99 compiler; and the caveat
that Windows builds do not require pthreads since BLIS can provide
an implementation of pthreads internally.
Details:
- Redefined the 'test' make target in the top-level Makefile so that the
final result ("everything passed" or at "least one failure") is echoed
to stdout. Note that 'check' is unchanged, and thus is now effectively
a fast version of 'test'.
- Updated docs/BuildSystem.md to reflect the above change.
Details:
- Defined a new struct datatype, rntm_t (runtime), to house the thrloop
field of the cntx_t (context). The thrloop array holds the number of
ways of parallelism (thread "splits") to extract per level-3
algorithmic loop until those values can be used to create a
corresponding node in the thread control tree (thrinfo_t structure),
which (for any given level-3 invocation) usually happens by the time
the macrokernel is called for the first time.
- Relocating the thrloop from the cntx_t remedies a thread-safety issue
when invoking level-3 operations from two or more application threads.
The race condition existed because the cntx_t, a pointer to which is
usually queried from the global kernel structure (gks), is supposed to
be a read-only. However, the previous code would write to the cntx_t's
thrloop field *after* it had been queried, thus violating its read-only
status. In practice, this would not cause a problem when a sequential
application made a multithreaded call to BLIS, nor when two or more
application threads used the same parallelization scheme when calling
BLIS, because in either case all application theads would be using
the same ways of parallelism for each loop. The true effects of the
race condition were limited to situations where two or more application
theads used *different* parallelization schemes for any given level-3
call.
- In remedying the above race condition, the application or calling
library can now specify the parallelization scheme on a per-call basis.
All that is required is that the thread encode its request for
parallelism into the rntm_t struct prior to passing the address of the
rntm_t to one of the expert interfaces of either the typed or object
APIs. This allows, for example, one application thread to extract 4-way
parallelism from a call to gemm while another application thread
requests 2-way parallelism. Or, two threads could each request 4-way
parallelism, but from different loops.
- A rntm_t* parameter has been added to the function signatures of most
of the level-3 implementation stack (with the most notable exception
being packm) as well as all level-1v, -1d, -1f, -1m, and -2 expert
APIs. (A few internal functions gained the rntm_t* parameter even
though they currently have no use for it, such as bli_l3_packm().)
This required some internal calls to some of those functions to
be updated since BLIS was already using those operations internally
via the expert interfaces. For situations where a rntm_t object is
not available, such as within packm/unpackm implementations, NULL is
passed in to the relevant expert interfaces. This is acceptable for
now since parallelism is not obtained for non-level-3 operations.
- Revamped how global parallelism is encoded. First, the conventional
environment variables such as BLIS_NUM_THREADS and BLIS_*_NT are only
read once, at library initialization. (Thanks to Nathaniel Smith for
suggesting this to avoid repeated calls getenv(), which can be slow.)
Those values are recorded to a global rntm_t object. Public APIs, in
bli_thread.c, are still available to get/set these values from the
global rntm_t, though now the "set" functions have additional logic
to ensure that the values are set in a synchronous manner via a mutex.
If/when NULL is passed into an expert API (meaning the user opted to
not provide a custom rntm_t), the values from the global rntm_t are
copied to a local rntm_t, which is then passed down the function stack.
Calling a basic API is equivalent to calling the expert APIs with NULL
for the cntx and rntm parameters, which means the semantic behavior of
these basic APIs (vis-a-vis multithreading) is unchanged from before.
- Renamed bli_cntx_set_thrloop_from_env() to bli_rntm_set_ways_for_op()
and reimplemented, with the function now being able to treat the
incoming rntm_t in a manner agnostic to its origin--whether it came
from the application or is an internal copy of the global rntm_t.
- Removed various global runtime APIs for setting the number of ways of
parallelism for individual loops (e.g. bli_thread_set_*_nt()) as well
as the corresponding "get" functions. The new model simplifies these
interfaces so that one must either set the total number of threads, OR
set all of the ways of parallelism for each loop simultaneously (in a
single function call).
- Updated sandbox/ref99 according to above changes.
- Rewrote/augmented docs/Multithreading.md to document the three methods
(and two specific ways within each method) of requesting parallelism
in BLIS.
- Removed old, disabled code from bli_l3_thrinfo.c.
- Whitespace changes to code (e.g. bli_obj.c) and docs/BuildSystem.md.
Details:
- Added missing pthreads library linking to example makefile in
docs/BuildSystem.md, as well as similar language to build requirements
at the beginning of the document. Thanks to Stefanos Mavros for
bringing this to our attention.
- Updated CREDITS file.
Details:
- Within the documents in docs/*.md, reverted links to other local
documents to relative paths.
- Fixed some links/documents that did not yet have the '.md' suffix.
- Testing whether we can use relative links ('docs/BLISTypedAPI.md')
from within README.md.
Details:
- Updated most markdown links in the documents/wikis to use absolute
paths instead of the relative paths that were in use previously.
A few links were not updated, except for adding a ".md" to reflect
the documents' new names, in order to test whether relative
linking still works.
Details:
- Exported all github wikis to a new 'docs' directory.
- Renamed 'BLISAPIQuickReference' wiki to 'BLISTypedAPI' and removed
all cntx_t* arguments from the (now non-expert) APIs (with the
exception of the kernel APIs).
- Added section to BuildSystem documenting new ARG_MAX hack.
