+cc some people who might be interested to make sure they see this :)
On 2020/10/28 07:32, Aisha Tammy wrote:
> Hi,
> I was wondering if it is possible to have multiple providers for a library
> and then selecting one of them to be used, selecting which provider is
> to be installed.
> Case in point, we have the math/{lapack,blas} libraries, which are the
> reference implementations and not optimized.
> I am working on getting OpenBLAS built and ported, which can also
> provide the libblas.so and liblapack.so (among other libraries).
> It is ABI compatible with the latest BLAS/LAPACK standards so it should
> ideally be a drop in replacement for the libraries for math/{lapack,blas}.
> This way there is a significant runtime benefit for multiple science
> libraries like numpy, scipy, eigen and a bunch of others.
> This replacement mechanism is provided in Gentoo and Debian (and its
> derivatives).
> I don't think we can have the full replacement mechanism at runtime
> due to the linking mechanism being different but it should at least
> be possible during install time and relinking libraries.
> I am not sure how to go about doing this in OpenBSD.
>
> Is there any interest in doing this? I am hoping I can put something
> together if people are interested in wanting OpenBLAS based libraries
>
> Cheers,
> Aisha
Having alternatives like this is similar to the case where a library has
flavours, which certainly adds complication - we mostly resist doing this
in ports, the exception is apr-util's ldap flavour and I wouldn't really
want to add more.
Is there likely to be a downside to switching outright to OpenBLAS?
