[petsc-dev] Internal and external symbols

[Garnet Vaz]

Hi Jed,

The latest patch causes a symbol re-definition error in:
petsc-dev / src / ksp / pc / impls / gamg / gamg.h
and
petsc-dev / src / ksp / pc / impls / gamg / gamg.c

for the logging events. Do you still
need the definitions in gamg.c?

Thanks,
Garnet

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 9:09 AM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> If you configure --with-visibility, PETSc will compile with
> -fvisibility=hidden so that any symbols that are _not_ declared with extern
> or PETSC_EXTERN will become local to the file. Unfortunately, when configure
> --with-clanguage=C++ --with-c-support, these internal symbols will have
> their names mangled and will expect function pointers to _not_ be extern "C"
> (unless using an extern "C" typedef). This is a relatively minor issue, but
> I would like to be more precise about what symbols we wish to be accessible.
> Note that anything that we want to be directly referenced by a plugin must
> be PETSC_EXTERN. This means that most functions in include/petsc-private
> should be PETSC_EXTERN, even though we don't expect normal users to call
> them.
>
> I just pushed a couple patches that add PETSC_INTERN and PETSC_INTERN_C (to
> be used when you always need an extern "C" interface) and applied the rule
> to a bunch of the src/**/*impl.h declarations. This reduces the number of
> exported symbols by a factor of 2, speeding up dispatch (no more calling
> through the PLT), allowing more shared-library code to be shared between
> multiple processes (important when running many MPI processes on
> small-memory nodes), and reducing linking and loading time.
>
> There are still more places that we could tighten up, but we probably need
> to refine our concept of which symbols are meant to be directly addressable
> from outside PETSc. Anyway, the initial guidelines from
> https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc-dev/commits/8413f6e91807356123f19f648513e17d0ebc6e4e
> are
>
> PETSC_INTERN is for symbols that are shared between files, but only used
> within one shared library. Note that PETSC_EXTERN must be used for symbols
> that are accessed from other shared libraries (e.g., a symbol in petscmat.so
> that is accessed from petscksp.so).
>
> PETSC_INTERN_C is for functions with internal visibility that must use the
> `extern "C"` calling convention. Normally this is any symbol passed to a
> dynamic registration function.



--
Regards,
Garnet