E.3 Compiling Octave with 64-bit Indexing

Note: the following only applies to systems that have 64-bit pointers. Configuring Octave with --enable-64 cannot magically make a 32-bit system have a 64-bit address space.

On 64-bit systems, Octave uses 64-bit integers for indexing arrays by default. If the configure script determines that your BLAS library uses 32-bit integers, then operations using the following libraries are limited to arrays with dimensions that are smaller than 2^{31} elements:

Additionally, the following libraries use int internally, so maximum problem sizes are always limited:

Except for GLPK and Qhull, these libraries may also be configured to use 64-bit integers, but most systems do not provide packages built this way. If you wish to experiment with large arrays, the following information may be helpful.

To determine the integer size of the BLAS library used by Octave, the following code can be executed:

clear all;
N = 2^31;
## The following line requires about 8 GB of RAM!
a = b = ones (N, 1, "single");
c = a' * b

If the BLAS library uses 32-bit integers, an error will be thrown:

error: integer dimension or index out of range for Fortran
INTEGER type

Otherwise, if the BLAS library uses 64-bit integers, the result is:

c = 2^31 = 2147483648

Note that the test case above usually requires twice the memory, if a and b are not assigned by a = b = …. Note further, that the data type single has a precision of about 23 binary bits. In this particular example no rounding errors occur.

Generally, it is best to have all of these libraries in versions that support 32-bit indexing, or all of these libraries must support 64-bit indexing. Mixing libraries with 64-bit indexing with libraries with 32-bit indexing can cause unpredictable behavior including program crashes with possible loss of data.

The following instructions were tested with the development version of Octave and GCC 4.3.4 on an x86_64 Debian system and may be out of date now. Please report any problems or corrections on the Octave bug tracker.

The versions listed below are the versions used for testing. If newer versions of these packages are available, you should try to use them, although there may be some differences.

All libraries and header files will be installed in subdirectories of $prefix64 (you must choose the location of this directory).