Re: [gentoo-soc] Benchmark suite project

[Brian Dolbec]

On Mon, 2011-05-23 at 21:21 +0200, Andrea Arteaga wrote:
> Hello all.
> My name is Andrea Arteaga and I'm working on the project "Automated
> benchmark suite for numerical libraries in Gentoo" for this year's
> Summer of Code.
>
> Very shortly: many implementations for numerical library standards
> such as BLAS, CBLAS, LAPACK, exist and are supported by Gentoo. My
> project aims to construct a benchmark suite which can detect the best
> suited one for the user's system and needs by performing a comparative
> benchmark analysis. This will also take into account packages emerged
> with special CFLAGS, FFLAGS, compilers, compiler versions...
>
> The benchmarks will be written in C or C++, re-using existing code
> when possible; the main part will consist of Python scripts. The
> project design is already defined and will be the following:
>
> * The main script will perform common tasks and will drive the user
> through the different steps
> * A special portage interface will use the portage APIs [I will need
> soime help here, see later] in order to provide a simple way for
> emerging and removing packages with special flags or environment
> * An interface-dependant module will tell the portage API which
> packages to emerge (e.g.: install blas-reference-20070226 using
> gcc-4.5.2), use them for the benchmarks and interpret the result. At
> the end it will also be responsible for a report.
> * An interface-dependant benchmarks program which is coupled with the
> module and will test the BLAS, CBLAS, LAPACK implementations.
>
> The program will do operations like "CFLAGS="-O3" emerge -B
> cblas-reference-20030223-r4" and similars, with some environments
> changes and building binary packages in special directories. I see
> that different threads already treat the portage APIs. I would like to
> ask which API is the best suited for this type of operations and where
> to find documentation for them (apart from pydoc).
>
> I still don't have a git repository, which I asked Robin to set up a
> few days ago, but the actual work is really starting.
>
> --
> Best
> Andrea Arteaga
>

Andrea, use the public_api branch of the portage git repo as much as
possible.  If there is additional functionality you need, then ask.  I
will gladly try to get it for you if possible.  I am just now adding
emerge capability to the api, so you should be able to use it later in
the project for emerging.  I would however set up your code to be able
to run emerge from a subprocess.  You should find the most common
information gathering functions in the api now.  They should be fairly
straightforward to use.  Keep in mind that the api is likely to change
somewhat yet as it is used more and improved.

start by creating a portage.api.settings.PortageSettings instance

Hopefully it will be merged into regular portage releases by the end of
this years gsoc.

As for custom CFLAGS and other
variables, /etc/portage/env/$CAT/$pkg/files are used for individual pkg
overrides.  As I've never used them I can't give you more detail about
it or where to look.

If you need to write to those files, I would like to establish some code
in the api to standardize it and make it available for use.  In the
meantime you can look if the one I use in porthole is suitable.  I run
it as root from a terminal call or import it and use it directly the
importing code has the right privileges.

http://porthole.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=porthole/porthole;a=blob;f=porthole/backends/set_config.py;h=8e78126377f8fc79fc51f9d17499df48a2e0270e;hb=HEAD

And if you need to keep an internal db of all those:

http://porthole.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=porthole/porthole;a=blob;f=porthole/db/user_configs.py;h=7f1c61459f26c6856f80d02cbdfb81ac3c04d7e2;hb=HEAD

-- 
Brian Dolbec <brian.dolbec@×××××.com>