SF.net SVN: fricas:[2637] trunk/INSTALL

[wheb...@users.sourceforge.net]

Revision: 2637
http://sourceforge.net/p/fricas/code/2637
Author: whebisch
Date: 2020-03-06 18:16:44 +0000 (Fri, 06 Mar 2020)
Log Message:
-----------
Update INSTALL

Modified Paths:
--------------
trunk/INSTALL

Modified: trunk/INSTALL
===================================================================
--- trunk/INSTALL 2020-03-06 14:33:51 UTC (rev 2636)
+++ trunk/INSTALL 2020-03-06 18:16:44 UTC (rev 2637)
@@ -40,7 +40,6 @@
Prerequisites:

- Lisp, one of:
- * GCL, 2.6.7 or 2.6.8
* sbcl, 1.0.7 or later
* clisp, 2.41 or later
* Clozure CL (former openmcl), starting from openmcl 1.1 prerelease
@@ -56,7 +55,11 @@
than clisp), Clozure CL the second (about 1.5 times slower than sbcl),
than gcl and ECL (about 3 times slower than sbcl) and clisp is the slowest
one. Note: older versions of ECL were much (about 4 times) slower,
- you should use newest version if you care about speed.
+ you should use newest version if you care about speed. FriCAS used
+ to build using GCL. However, due to incompatible changes in GCL newest
+ GCL will not work for FriCAS, build will fail. Unfortunatly failing
+ versions show the same version number, namely 2.6.12 as working ones.
+ So currently using GCL for building FriCAS is unsupported.

Some computation work much faster on 64-bit machines, especially
when using sbcl.
@@ -129,6 +132,8 @@
Alternatively for sbcl one can use '--dynamic-space-size' argument
to decrease use of virtual memory.

+- building FriCAS fails when using newest gcl
+
- older gcl had serious problems on Macs and Windows.

- released gcl-2.6.9 has a bug which causes failure of FriCAS
@@ -224,15 +229,6 @@

http://ecls.sourceforge.net

-- gcl, version 2.6.8 works OK. If you want to try development
- version from git note that main branch currently is very
- unstable and can not build FriCAS.
-
- In the past in case of build problems the following configure line
- was helpful:
-
- ./configure --disable-xgcl --disable-dynsysbfd --disable-statsysbfd --enable-locbfd
-
- clisp

http://clisp.cons.org
@@ -255,6 +251,12 @@

svn co svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/fricas/code/trunk fricas

+Aternatively, there is git mirror at github. To fetch it is
+the following command (remove the "--depth 1" option for access
+to the change history):
+
+git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fricas/fricas
+
2) Create build directory and change to it:

mkdir ax-build
@@ -276,6 +278,39 @@

-------------------------------------------------------

+Arguments for the configure script
+
+To choose the installation location, use the '--prefix' option and specify a
+path.
+
+Selecting a Lisp compiler:
+
+Currently --with-lisp option accepts all supported lisp variants, namely
+sbcl, clisp, ecl and Clozure CL (openmcl). Note: the argument
+is just command to invoke chosen Lisp. Build machinery will
+automatically detect which Lisp is in use and adjust as needed.
+
+Optimization settings for Lisp compilation: see "Algebra optimization".
+
+GMP (for faster arbitrary precision arithmetic): search for "Using GMP" in this
+document.
+
+Example configure command:
+
+../fricas/configure --prefix=/home/nsajko/usr \
+ '--with-lisp=sbcl --control-stack-size 512 --dynamic-space-size 6000' \
+ --enable-gmp
+
+This configures make to
+
+* install to /home/nsajko/usr
+
+* build lisp with SBCL and increased stack and heap memory limits
+
+* make FriCAS use GMP which is installed in /usr
+
+-------------------------------------------------------
+
Algebra optimization

When writing/compiling programs there is always tradeoff
@@ -314,8 +349,38 @@

--------------------------------------------------------

+Linux: get better performance when really necessary
+
+The Linux operating system kernel usually uses methods to mitigate some CPU
+security bugs, and these mitigations can take a great toll on code execution
+speed. This is mainly a problem for Intel machines.
+
+As the mitigations are required for security on affected harware platforms when
+executing untrusted code (like in Web browsers, for example); the typical
+scenario where one would disable the kernel mitigations while using FriCAS is
+when it is known that the computations will be resource and time (e.g., many
+hours) demanding, or when one has a machine dedicated to trusted code (so no
+browsing the Web).
+
+If one wants to execute untrusted code while running FriCAS; even if the
+untrusted code is behind a hypervisor, virtual machine, JavaScript engine,
+etc.; DO NOT DISABLE THE MITIGATIONS.
+
+If one is sure that it is safe for one's system to do so, one may disable some
+of these mitigations by adding mitigations=off to the kernel's boot parameters.
+This will probably be accomplished by configuring the bootloader, so read the
+bootloader's documentation for details. The following may also be useful:
+https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kernel_parameters
+https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.html
+https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/hw-vuln/
+
+--------------------------------------------------------
+
Using GMP with sbcl or Clozure CL.

+See https://gmplib.org for more information on the GNU Multiple Precision
+Arithmetic Library.
+
Currently on average FriCAS is fastest when compiled using sbcl.
However, sbcl normally uses its own routines for computations
with large numbers and those routines are slower than GMP.
@@ -322,9 +387,8 @@
FriCAS now has special support to replace sbcl arithmetic
routines by GMP. To use this support install GMP including
header files (development package if you install via a package
-manager). Currently there are two available GMP versions,
-version 5 is much faster than version 4. Then configure FriCAS
-adding '--enable-gmp' option to the 'configure' arguments.
+manager). Then configure FriCAS adding '--enable-gmp' option
+to the 'configure' arguments.

FriCAS also has support for using GMP with Clozure CL.
Currently Clozure CL with GMP works on 32/64 bit Intel/AMD

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