3.3.9

[R Clint Whaley <rwhaley@cs.utk.edu>]

Guys,

3.3.9 is out.  This is the feature-frozen first stable release candidate.
What exactly does this mean?  Not a whole lot at this point; the main thing
is that all planned features are in.  There should be no more new routines
added, with the exception of bug fixes and perhaps some new kernels.

It is obviously not yet ready for release.  The main thing I will be
concentrating on at first is getting the architectural defaults up to date.
Right now, Athlon and PIII are the only defaults I'm confident in.  One good
news on this front is it looks like gcc 3.0.2 fixes the UltraSparc
compiler error, so I should be able to get arch defaults that get
better performance than we've ever had, and with a free compiler
(before, I had to use Sun's compiler to get the best performance,
which kind of screwed non-solaris users) . . .

Most of the documentation is also not up to date, but I will wait on that
until last.

If anyone is planning on a kernel submission, you should aim to get it in ASAP.
I'm not sure how long I will be accepting new kernels for the new stable
release, but it will be an increasingly steep threshhold to get over as I get
closer to the stable.  If I don't know about you working on a kernel, you 
might let me know so I can factor it in if you want it in the next stable . . .

Anyone with CVS write access should be especially careful from now on.
If there's a big demand for new development, we can branch the stable
candidate, but I'd rather branch development until the stable is released
(at which point it gets a bug-fix branch) . . .

There's not a lot I can ask anyone to do at this point, but you may want to
grab the tarfile and give it a look just to see if you think I have left
something out, or get back any feedback you might have before I proceed
too far.  Once I have the arch defaults rolling for various archs, there'll
be more stuff to scope . . .

The main change in this release from last is that I have brought the level 2
kernels up to date with the features found in Level 1 and 3.  In particular,
you can now specify your own compiler, even use a .o.  All level 2 kernels
now use an identifier, as do the other levels, so that arch defaults don't
get screwed up everytime you change a description file.  SYMV is also tuned
separately from GEMV, which may give an advantage on some platforms.  I've
updated ATLAS/doc/atlas_contrib.ps to reflect these new features.

Julian also improved his DGEMM Athlon kernel slightly, and that is in the
package, along with a PIIISSE1 [d,z]gemm kernel I wrote.  That gives a slight
performance improvement for some apps, your mileage may vary.

I've also added a Makefile to the ATLAS/lib/ARCH directory, that will create
the standard precompiled archive .tar.gz, as requested on the feature
request by Peter.

As always, you can grab the latest and greatest at:
   https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23725

Cheers,
Clint