Re: R

[Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>]

Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> writes:

> There’s a separate section for OpenBLAS, which also mentions that using
> a “shared BLAS” is a preferred alternative to linking with a particular
> BLAS implementation.  We already pass “--enable-BLAS-shlib”, so we
> actually do use a shared BLAS, IIUC.
>
> I guess we could drop the “--with-blas” flag and see if that helps.  I
> remember struggling with this a lot in the past.  I’ll try building R
> again without that flag and see if it still works.

I dropped the flag and noticed that OpenBLAS is not mentioned at all (it
does retain a reference, but that’s expected when “openblas” is among
the inputs), so I also dropped “openblas” from the inputs and R built
just fine.

It’s a bit sad to me that we won’t be able to just use this BLAS
implementation, but if it fixes the build on ARM and MIPS I’m all for
it.

I can also confirm that dropping openblas from the R build “fixes” the
segfault when running

    x <- eigen(crossprod(matrix(rnorm(50 * 500), 50, 500)))

as reported here: https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/issues/703

So, I think it’s a good idea to build R without OpenBLAS on all
architectures for now.

~~ Ricardo