Building ASCEND for 64-bit Windows

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Revision as of 16:41, 27 January 2012 by Jpye (talk | contribs) (→Steps to date)
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There are a number of barriers to building ASCEND on 64-bit Windows:

We are working towards fixing these items.

Steps to date

  • install MSYS bundle to c:\msys as instructed here
  • install MinGW-64 bundle to c:\mingw64 as instructed (we used mingw-w64-bin_i686-mingw_20111220.zip
  • install 64-bit Python 2.7.2
  • append /c/Python27 and /c/Python27/Scripts to the PATH in MSYS.
  • download and extract source tarball for SCons 1.2.0. Build via python setup.py bdist_wininst then install resulting .exe in dist subfolder.
  • create 'scons' file in c:\Python27\Scripts containing
#!/bin/sh
python /c/Python27/Scripts/scons.py $*
  • svn checkout ASCEND source code (from trunk)
  • scons

Test suite

  • The CUnit test suites seem to be basically working. We have made changes to CUnit and currently require that you access the svn trunk version of CUnit for ASCEND testing. A new CUnit release is planned.
  • Suite 'utilities_ascEnvVar' current crashing.

Python bindings

  • Installed SWIG 1.3.40
  • Seems to be an issue with linking to python27.lib. The problem may be that described here, or it could be a 64-bit specific problem (or both). Perhaps we should try what happens with Python 2.5 alternatively.

Things we need to work on:

  • A lot of new compiler warnings due to the very new GCC version 4.7 used by MinGW-64 that will need to be worked through.
  • Installing the MinGW-64 toolchain with 'standard' (local) tool filenames (maybe a quick script to rename or symlink them?)
  • Detecting 32-bit vs 64-bit Windows?
  • Detecting Python linker flags
  • Building PyGTK etc for our version of Python
  • Packaging it all (will NSIS 32-bit be OK to use?)
  • Conversions between 'void *' and 'unsigned long' don't seem to work on Win64. Instead, Windows wants 'void *' to be cast to 'unsigned long long', since those pointers are the same size.
  • Something strange happening with MMIO...?
  • it's probably going to be better and easier to use the MSYS package from the MinGW project, and then to just overlay the Mingw-w64 files within that environment. Need to check that it works.
  • there doesn't seem to be any harm in using a 32-bit compiler executable, even if the target is 64-bit.
  • failing test cases:
    • utilities_ascSignal (appears not to be an issue only with Win64)
    • compiler_fixfree (looks like an asc_intptr_t issue)
    • compiler_autodiff (issue with a non-null pointer in line 198)
    • compiler_bintok (program hangs! possibly just a conifuration issue?)
    • compiler_blackbox (looks like an asc_intptr_t issue)
    • solver_ipopt (looks like an asc_intptr_t issue, see below)
Assertion failed!

Program: C:\msys\home\jdpye\ascend\test\test.exe
File: ascend\compiler\setinstval.c, Line 134

Expression: sizeof(long)==sizeof(char *)

Cunit

  • use SVN trunk code
  • ./configure --prefix=/mingw --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --build=mingw32
  • make install

SUNDIALS

SUNDIALS is used by the IDA solver in ASCEND.

  • ./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --prefix=/mingw
  • make -j4
  • make install

IPOPT

  • download and extract the 'findutils' lzma tarball from here; put the extract 'find.exe' and 'xargs.exe' into c:/msys/bin.
  • download the source tarball for IPOPT 3.10.1
  • cd ThirdParty/Blas && ./get.Blas (note that on my system I had to edit the URL in the get.Blas script to use "http:" instead of "ftp:")
  • cd ThirdParty/Metis && ./get.Metis
  • cd ThirdParty/Mumps && ./get.Mumps
  • cd ThirdParty/Lapack && ./get.Lapack
  • ./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --prefix=/mingw
  • make -j4
  • make install

If the install works OK you should have some /mingw/libcoin* and /mingw/libipopt.a files.

This will build you a static IPOPT solver. There isn't a way to build a DLL of IPOPT with MinGW yet, apparently.

To get scons to detect this build of IPOPT, use 

scons --config=force -j4 IPOPT_LIBPATH=/mingw/lib IPOPT_PREFIX=/mingw IPOPT_LIBS=ipopt,coinmumps,coinmetis,coinlapack,coinblas,gfortran,stdc++

The above seems to work fine, except that it results in a dynamic link to libgfortran-3.dll that must be satisfied at runtime in order for IPOPT to work. Possibly a solution will be 

F77FLAGS="-static" ./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --prefix=/mingw

Wait and see if that works...

GDB

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