Building MSieve without VS?

SWSaunders · 2013-04-25, 23:31

Is it possible to build msieve with gpu support from the latest svn sources using only cygwin? Meaning, without relying on Visual Studio?

I've tried running polynomial generation using the precompiled 151_gpu, but it only gets a few seconds in before terminating with "Illegal instruction." Everything I've read so far has indicated I need to build my own executable to avoid that issue. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of VS at my disposal at the moment, however.

If the question has been asked before, apologies. I searched and found no likely culprits.

jasonp · 2013-04-26, 00:35

It has been a while since I tried building in cygwin. From the cygwin shell you should be able to do

Code:

make all NO_ZLIB=1 CUDA=1 WIN=1

from the base source directory and get a usable msieve.exe; however, if you are getting illegal instruction errors it's possible the machine you're running the binary on is old, and you might have to replace '-march=core2' in the makefile with '-march=native'.

SWSaunders · 2013-04-26, 02:47

For clarity:

it was the already-compiled msieve151_gpu.exe downloaded from SourceForge that was giving me an "Illegal instruction" error when I ran it.
before building, I changed the makefile to use "-march=athlon64" as that's the architecture I'm be running on; I did not try native (and I will shortly)
my build command was "make all WIN=1 CUDA=1", but I'll add NO_ZLIB=1
when building (with -march=athlon64), the build would fail with a fatal error reading "Cannot find compiler 'cl.exe'", which I understand to be part of Visual Studio (which I have not installed... hence, my original question)

jasonp · 2013-04-26, 11:19

Unfortunately, I'd forgotten that the GPU branch builds CUDA code with Nvidia's NVCC compiler, which on windows requires Microsoft's compiler to be present. You don't need to run a MSVC project, but you do need cl.exe in your path.

MS makes the compiler toolchain for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 available as a free download. You never have to use it directly, but you need it for CUDA code. In fact you still need it even if you are only building code to run on a GPU, because the compilation process requires Microsoft's preprocessor.

2013-04-25, 23:31	#1
SWSaunders Apr 2013 2 Posts	Building MSieve without VS? Is it possible to build msieve with gpu support from the latest svn sources using only cygwin? Meaning, without relying on Visual Studio? I've tried running polynomial generation using the precompiled 151_gpu, but it only gets a few seconds in before terminating with "Illegal instruction." Everything I've read so far has indicated I need to build my own executable to avoid that issue. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of VS at my disposal at the moment, however. If the question has been asked before, apologies. I searched and found no likely culprits.

2013-04-26, 00:35	#2
jasonp Tribal Bullet Oct 2004 6725₈ Posts	It has been a while since I tried building in cygwin. From the cygwin shell you should be able to do Code: make all NO_ZLIB=1 CUDA=1 WIN=1 from the base source directory and get a usable msieve.exe; however, if you are getting illegal instruction errors it's possible the machine you're running the binary on is old, and you might have to replace '-march=core2' in the makefile with '-march=native'.

2013-04-26, 02:47	#3
SWSaunders Apr 2013 2 Posts	For clarity: it was the already-compiled msieve151_gpu.exe downloaded from SourceForge that was giving me an "Illegal instruction" error when I ran it. before building, I changed the makefile to use "-march=athlon64" as that's the architecture I'm be running on; I did not try native (and I will shortly) my build command was "make all WIN=1 CUDA=1", but I'll add NO_ZLIB=1 when building (with -march=athlon64), the build would fail with a fatal error reading "Cannot find compiler 'cl.exe'", which I understand to be part of Visual Studio (which I have not installed... hence, my original question)

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2013-04-26, 11:19	#4
jasonp Tribal Bullet Oct 2004 DD5₁₆ Posts	Unfortunately, I'd forgotten that the GPU branch builds CUDA code with Nvidia's NVCC compiler, which on windows requires Microsoft's compiler to be present. You don't need to run a MSVC project, but you do need cl.exe in your path. MS makes the compiler toolchain for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 available as a free download. You never have to use it directly, but you need it for CUDA code. In fact you still need it even if you are only building code to run on a GPU, because the compilation process requires Microsoft's preprocessor.