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How to build OpenBLAS for iPhone iOS (ARMv8)

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Isuru Fernando edited this page Feb 17, 2020 · 10 revisions

How to build OpenBLAS for iPhone/iOS

As none of the current developers uses iOS, it is unfortunately still unclear if the following instructions are sufficient to build a fully working OpenBLAS for this platform. Apple provides its own implementation of BLAS/LAPACK under the name Accelerate so you may want to just use that unless you are specifically interested in OpenBLAS.

Go to the directory where you unpacked OpenBLAS. (latest develop branch or 0.3.9 or later)

Next, create a file with the following content:

     SDKROOT=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS10.2.sdk
     make TARGET=ARMV8 BINARY=64 HOSTCC=clang CC="clang" CFLAGS="-isysroot $SDKROOT -arch arm64" NOFORTRAN=1 libs

(adjust the SDKROOT as necessary for your installation, e.g. change the version number of the SDK to what you have installed) and execute this file to build the library.

Note that ARMV8 is a generic implementation that should work on most arm64 hardware, for best performance try compiling with TARGET=CORTEXA57 or equivalent cpu-specific entry from TargetList.txt as appropriate for your hardware. Unfortunately it is unclear at the moment whether the Xcode assembler will accept the dialect used in the assembly files. According to issue #1531, you will probably have to edit the file kernel/arm64/KERNEL.ARMV8 and replace the line SGEMMKERNEL= sgemm_kernel_4x4.S with SGEMMKERNEL=../generic/gemmkernel_2x2.c to work around one such incompatibility.(This is done automatically starting from version 0.3.4)

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