OpenBLAS binary packages

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 15, 2019, at 07:36, Nicolas Pavillon wrote:

> Now that OpenBLAS became more widely used and is now a dependency for several other ports, I could look into making a ‘generic’ version as suggested, if it is considered preferable to reduce the building time at the cost of performance. 

Seems like a good idea to me. I don't directly use OpenBLAS so I don't know how significant the performance implications of that would be, but for those users for whom the performance difference is significant, they can rebuild with the proposed new variant -- presuming that that would be possible to do (i.e. presuming that the selection of how OpenBLAS is built does not infect the other ports that use OpenBLAS as a dependency).


On May 15, 2019, at 08:27, Nicolas Pavillon wrote:

> Also, it comes down to what should be considered a ‘generic’ version. Cutting down all AVX instructions would imply a significant loss in performance, even though probably that a large majority of computers can handle these, but I guess it would be pretty hard to avoid that, so that we would have to settle for the least common denominator. 

But since we offer separate binaries for each OS version, you can use different defaults for each OS version. Mojave has higher system requirements than High Sierra did, for example. So for each OS version, you can research what the minimum supported CPU is and use flags appropriate to that CPU for that OS version.