[Paraview] Building ParaView v5.1.2 on Linux from source with support for GPU and SWR.

[Albina, Frank]

Ben,

Thank you very much for the information in your email. 

>> 3.     You need a GNU compiler v4.8.0 or above to build. My Linux
>> distribution comes with gcc v4.7.2. Fortunately, I had gcc v4.9.2 
>> installed with which I could perform a successful build.

> What subproject required this?

I had to recompile from scractch, which took a bit of time. Actually, the GNU compiler requirement is coming from building the OSPRAY project, as shown hereafter:

[...]
CMake Error at cmake/gcc.cmake:48 (MESSAGE):
  GCC version 4.8.0 or greater is required to build OSPRay.
Call Stack (most recent call first):
  cmake/ospray.cmake:97 (INCLUDE)
  common/CMakeLists.txt:17 (CONFIGURE_OSPRAY)


-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
[...]

> The new superbuild has support for building mesa 12.0.3 as part of the build. We used prebuilt binaries before because our build machine was Debian 6 which was not easily capable of compiling the LLVM -> Mesa chain > without a self-compiled compiler and such, so it was built once and that was it. I think it did contain SWR since it was a git snapshot.
> Utkarsh?

As additional information, I have cloned the git repository and did:
git checkout origin/release

which I then used to build Paraview V5.1.2 along with all dependencies.

If the new superbuild has support for building mesa 12.0.3, I would be interested in trying this out. Are there any instructions I can follow to do that?

My intention is to compile paraview without GUI to run it in batch on our cluster. This is the main reason why I am using a specific test suite to check the performance of mesa-llvm vs. mesa-swr vs. GPU. At the moment, on CPUs supporting AVX2 instruction set, mesa-swr shows a very decent performance. Hence, my interest also to try out the latest mesa 12.0.3 version, which I have downloaded today and started compiling. In this regard, do you have any configuration options you can share for use in offscreen mode? If this is handled already by the latest superbuild version, then please disregard the questions above.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Regards,

Frank.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Boeckel [mailto:ben.boeckel at kitware.com] 
Sent: Mittwoch, 28. September 2016 14:45
To: Albina, Frank
Cc: David E DeMarle; Del Citto, Francesco; paraview at paraview.org
Subject: Re: [Paraview] Building ParaView v5.1.2 on Linux from source with support for GPU and SWR.

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 10:06:15 +0200, Albina, Frank wrote:
> In this regard, I would like to point out a few things I have found 
> while performing the build process on the aforementioned Linux 
> distribution. Note that my incentive is to help improve the ParaView 
> software suite as well as helping others to be able to build and use 
> the software.

Thanks for the feedback. Responses inline.

> 2.     You definitely need cmake at least cmake v3.5 (and not v3.3) to
> compile ParaView from SuperBuild.

Ah, ParaView is 3.3, but the superbuild is 3.5. As a heads up, the new superbuild which will be used for ParaView 5.2 will require at least 3.6.1.

> 3.     You need a GNU compiler v4.8.0 or above to build. My Linux
> distribution comes with gcc v4.7.2. Fortunately, I had gcc v4.9.2 
> installed with which I could perform a successful build.

What subproject required this?

> 4.     Dependencies such libsz, libxml, libbzip2 are built and stored
> in the <build>/install/lib64 directory on my platform. This creates 
> linking issues which I could partly resolve by pushing the missing 
> libraries into the <build>/install/lib directory. This is not ideal 
> but could be solved by forcing the lib directory to 
> <build>/install/lib using the --libdir option.

Hrm. I'm on Fedora (which also uses lib64) and though I had gotten all the lib64-isms out of the superbuild. Maybe I had missed some before
5.1.2 (the superbuild now uses common infrastructure shared between other similar superbuilds).

> 5.     The vistrails plugin cannot be built. After 3 attempts, the git
> clone from https://kwgitlab.kitware.com/paraview/vistrails.git fails.
> Either the link is wrong or the server is unreachable.

vistrails should be hidden behind a "USE_NONFREE_COMPONENTS" flag.
vistrails (and acusolve) are not FOSS, so their git repos are on our internal server.

> 6.     The mesa libraries are pre-compiled and downloaded to
> <buils>/mesa-downloads. They are unpacked and moved into the ParaView 
> installation directory when performing “make install”. These libraries 
> are dating from May 3rd, hence prior to the release of Mesa 12.0 which 
> embeds OpenSWR as a build option. Is there a way to build new libGL.so 
> and libOSMesa.so libraries based on Mesa3D v12.0 and replace the 
> currently pre-compiled binaries? If so,what are the typical 
> configuration options used in this case?

The new superbuild has support for building mesa 12.0.3 as part of the build. We used prebuilt binaries before because our build machine was Debian 6 which was not easily capable of compiling the LLVM -> Mesa chain without a self-compiled compiler and such, so it was built once and that was it. I think it did contain SWR since it was a git snapshot.
Utkarsh?

--Ben