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hdf5/doc/html/ADGuide/RELEASE.txt
Frank Baker 5fc2f23ed0 [svn-r3483] 
Purpose:
    Updated from hdf5/RELEASE.txt.
Platforms tested:
    IE 5
2001-02-21 16:44:18 -05:00

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HDF5 Release 1.4.0
INTRODUCTION
This document describes the differences between HDF5-1.2.0 and
HDF5-1.4.0, and contains information on the platforms tested and
known problems in HDF5-1.4.0. For more details check the HISTORY.txt
file in the HDF5 source.
The HDF5 documentation can be found on the NCSA ftp server
(ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu) in the directory:
/HDF/HDF5/docs/
For more information look at the HDF5 home page at:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to:
hdfhelp@ncsa.uiuc.edu
CONTENTS
- New Features
- h4toh5 Utility
- F90 Support
- C++ Support
- Pablo Support
- Bug Fixes since HDF5-1.2.0
- Bug Fixes since HDF5-1.4.0-beta2
- Documentation
- Platforms Tested
- Supported Configuration Features
- Known Problems
New Features
============
* The Virtual File Layer, VFL, was added to replace the old file
drivers. It also provides an API for user defined file drivers.
* New features added to snapshots. Use 'snapshot help' to see a
complete list of features.
* Improved configure to detect if MPIO routines are available when
parallel mode is requested.
* Added Thread-Safe support. Phase I implemented. See:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/papers/mthdf/MTHDFpaper.htm
for more details.
* Added data sieve buffering to raw data I/O path. This is enabled
for all VFL drivers except the mpio & core drivers. Setting the
sieve buffer size is controlled with the new API function,
H5Pset_sieve_buf_size(), and retrieved with H5Pget_sieve_buf_size().
* Added new Virtual File Driver, Stream VFD, to send/receive entire
HDF5 files via socket connections.
* As parts of VFL, HDF-GASS and HDF-SRB are also added to this
release. To find out details, please read INSTALL_VFL file.
* Increased maximum number of dimensions for a dataset (H5S_MAX_RANK)
from 31 to 32 to align with HDF4 & netCDF.
* Added 'query' function to VFL drivers. Also added 'type' parameter to
VFL 'read' & 'write' calls, so they are aware of the type of data
being accessed in the file. Updated the VFL document also.
* A new h4toh5 utility, to convert HDF4 files to analogous HDF5 files.
* Added a new array datatype to the datatypes which can be created.
Removed "array fields" from compound datatypes (use an array datatype
instead).
* Parallel HDF5 works correctly with mpich-1.2.1 on Solaris, SGI, Linux.
* You can now install the HDF5 documentation using the
``make install-doc'' command. The documentation is installed in the
$(prefix)/doc directory where $(prefix) is the prefix specified by
the (optional) ``--prefix'' flag during configuration.
* HDF5 can operate correctly in the OpenMP environment in a limited way.
Check doc/html/TechNotes/openmp-hdf5.html for details.
h4toh5 Utility
==============
The h4toh5 utility is a new utility that converts an HDF4 file to an
HDF5 file. For details, see the document, "Mapping HDF4 Objects to
HDF5 Objects":
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/papers/H4-H5MappingGuidelines.pdf
Known Bugs:
The h4toh5 utility produces images that do not correctly conform
to the HDF5 Image and Palette Specification.
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/ImageSpec.html
Several required HDF5 attributes are omitted, and the dataspace
is reversed (i.e., the ht. and width of the image dataset is
incorrectly described.) For more information, please see:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/H5Image/ImageDetails.htm
Known Limitations of the h4toh5 release
---------------------------------------------
1. Error Handling
Error reporting is minimal.
2. String Datatype
HDF4 has no 'string' type. String valued data are usually defined as
an array of 'char' in HDF4. The h4toh5 utility will generally map
these to HDF5 'String' types rather than array of char, with the
following additional rules:
* For the data of an HDF4 SDS, image, and palette, if the data is
declared 'DFNT_CHAR8' it will be assumed to be integer and will
be an H5T_INTEGER type.
* For attributes of any HDF4 object, data of type 'DFNT_CHAR8'
will be converted to an HDF5 'H5T_STRING' type.
* For an HDF4 Vdata, it is difficult to determine whether data
of type 'DFNT_CHAR8' is intended to be bytes or characters. The
h4toh5 utility will consider them to be C characters, and will
convert them to an HDF5 'H5T_STRING' type.
3. Compression, Chunking and External Storage
Chunking is supported, but compression and external storage is not.
An HDF4 object that uses chunking will be converted to an HDF5 file
with analogous chunked storage.
An HDF4 object that uses compression will be converted to an
uncompressed HDF5 object.
An HDF4 object that uses external storage will be converted to an
HDF5 object without external storage.
4. Memory Use
This version of the h4toh5 utility copies data from HDF4 objects
in a single read followed by a single write to the HDF5 object. For
large objects, this requires a very large amount of memory, which may
be extremely slow or fail on some platforms.
Note that a dataset that has only been partly written will
be read completely, including uninitialized data, and all the
data will be written to the HDF5 object.
5. Platforms
The h4toh5 utility requires HDF5-1.4.0 and HDF4r1.4
h4toh5 utility has been tested on all platforms listed below (see
section "Platforms Tested") except TFLOPS.
F90 Support
===========
This is the first release of the HDF5 Library with fully integrated
F90 API support. The Fortran Library is created when the
--enable-fortran flag is specified during configuration.
Not all F90 subroutines are implemented. Please refer to the HDF5
Reference Manual for more details.
F90 APIs are available for the Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, Linux, DEC UNIX,
T3E, SV1 and O2K (64 bit option only) platforms. The Parallel version of
the HDF5 F90 Library is supported on the O2K and T3E platforms.
Changes since the last prototype release (July 2000)
----------------------------------------------------
* h5open_f and h5close_f must be called instead of h5init_types and
h5close_types.
* The following subroutines are no longer available:
h5pset_xfer_f
h5pget_xfer_f
h5pset_mpi_f
h5pget_mpi_f
h5pset_stdio_f
h5pget_stdio_f
h5pset_sec2_f
h5pget_sec2_f
h5pset_core_f
h5pget_core_f
h5pset_family_f
h5pget_family_f
* The following functions have been added:
h5pset_fapl_mpio_f
h5pget_fapl_mpio_f
h5pset_dxpl_mpio_f
h5pget_dxpl_mpio_f
* In the previous HDF5 F90 releases, the implementation of object
references and dataset region references was not portable. This
release introduces a portable implementation, but it also introduces
changes to the read/write APIs that handle references. If object or
dataset region references are written or read to/from an HDF5 file,
h5dwrite_f and h5dread_f must use the extra parameter, n, for the
buffer size:
h5dwrite(read)_f(dset_id, mem_type_id, buf, n, hdferr, &
^^^
mem_space_id, file_space_id, xfer_prp)
For other datatypes the APIs were not changed.
C++ Support
===========
This is the first release of the HDF5 Library with fully integrated
C++ API support. The HDF5 C++ library is built when the --enable-cxx
flag is specified during configuration.
Check the HDF5 Reference Manual for available C++ documentation.
C++ APIs are available for Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, Linux, and FreeBSD.
Pablo Support
=============
This version does not allow proper building of the Pablo-instrumented
version of the library. A version supporting the pablo build is
available on the Pablo Website at
www-pablo.cs.uiuc.edu/pub/Pablo.Release.5/HDFLibrary/hdf5_v1.4.tar.gz
Bug Fixes since HDF5-1.2.0
==========================
Library
-------
* The function H5Pset_mpi is renamed as H5Pset_fapl_mpio.
* Corrected a floating point number conversion error for the Cray J90
platform. The error did not convert the value 0.0 correctly.
* Error was fixed which was not allowing dataset region references to
have their regions retrieved correctly.
* Corrected a bug that caused non-parallel file drivers to fail in
the parallel version.
* Added internal free-lists to reduce memory required by the library
and H5garbage_collect API function
* Fixed error in H5Giterate which was not updating the "index"
parameter correctly.
* Fixed error in hyperslab iteration which was not walking through the
correct sequence of array elements if hyperslabs were staggered in a
certain pattern
* Fixed several other problems in hyperslab iteration code.
* Fixed another H5Giterate bug which was causes groups with large
numbers of objects in them to misbehave when the callback function
returned non-zero values.
* Changed return type of H5Aiterate and H5A_operator_t typedef to be
herr_t, to align them with the dataset and group iterator functions.
* Changed H5Screate_simple and H5Sset_extent_simple to not allow
dimensions of size 0 with out the same dimension being unlimited.
* QAK - 4/19/00 - Improved metadata hashing & caching algorithms to
avoid many hash flushes and also remove some redundant I/O when
moving metadata blocks in the file.
* The "struct(opt)" type conversion function which gets invoked for
certain compound datatype conversions was fixed for nested compound
types. This required a small change in the datatype conversion
function API.
* Re-wrote lots of the hyperslab code to speed it up quite a bit.
* Added bounded garbage collection for the free lists when they run
out of memory and also added H5set_free_list_limits API call to
allow users to put an upper limit on the amount of memory used for
free lists.
* Checked for non-existent or deleted objects when dereferencing one
with object or region references and disallow dereference.
* "Time" datatypes (H5T_UNIX_D*) were not being stored and retrieved
from object headers correctly, fixed now.
* Fixed H5Dread or H5Dwrite calls with H5FD_MPIO_COLLECTIVE requests
that may hang because not all processes are transfer the same amount
of data. (A.K.A. prematured collective return when zero amount data
requested.) Collective calls that may cause hanging is done via the
corresponding MPI-IO independent calls.
* If configure with --enable-debug=all, couple functions would issue
warning messages to "stderr" that the operation is expensive time-wise.
This messed up applications (like testings) that did not expect the
extra output. It is changed so that the warning will be printed only
if the corresponding Debug key is set.
Configuration
-------------
* The hdf5.h include file was fixed to allow the HDF5 Library to be
compiled with other libraries/applications that use GNU autoconf.
* Configuration for parallel HDF5 was improved. Configure now attempts
to link with libmpi.a and/or libmpio.a as the MPI libraries by
default. It also uses "mpirun" to launch MPI tests by default. It
tests to link MPIO routines during the configuration stage, rather
than failing later as before. One can just do "./configure
--enable-parallel" if the MPI library is in the system library.
* Added support for pthread library and thread-safe option.
* The libhdf5.settings file shows the correct machine byte-sex.
* Added option "--enable-stream-vfd" to configure w/o the Stream VFD.
For Solaris, added -lsocket to the LIBS list of libraries.
Tools
-----
* h5dump now accepts both short and long command-line parameters:
-h, --help Print a usage message and exit
-B, --bootblock Print the content of the boot block
-H, --header Print the header only; no data is displayed
-i, --object-ids Print the object ids
-V, --version Print version number and exit
-a P, --attribute=P Print the specified attribute
-d P, --dataset=P Print the specified dataset
-g P, --group=P Print the specified group and all members
-l P, --soft-link=P Print the value(s) of the specified soft link
-o F, --output=F Output raw data into file F
-t T, --datatype=T Print the specified named data type
-w #, --width=# Set the number of columns
P - is the full path from the root group to the object.
T - is the name of the data type.
F - is a filename.
# - is an integer greater than 1.
* A change from the old way command line parameters were interpreted
is that multiple attributes, datasets, groups, soft-links, and
object-ids cannot be specified with just one flag but you have to
use a flag with each object. I.e., instead of doing this:
h5dump -a /attr1 /attr2 foo.h5
do this:
h5dump -a /attr1 -a /attr2 foo.h5
The cases are similar for the other object types.
* h5dump correctly displays compound datatypes.
* Corrected an error in h5toh4 which did not convert the 32bits
int from HDF5 to HDF4 correctly for the T3E platform.
* h5dump correctly displays the committed copy of predefined types
correctly.
* Added an option, -V, to show the version information of h5dump.
* Fixed a core dumping bug of h5toh4 when executed on platforms like
TFLOPS.
* The test script for h5toh4 used to not able to detect the hdp
dumper command was not valid. It now detects and reports the
failure of hdp execution.
* Merged the tools with the 1.2.2 branch. Required adding new
macros, VERSION12 and VERSION13, used in conditional compilation.
Updated the Windows project files for the tools.
* h5dump displays opaque and bitfield data correctly.
* h5dump and h5ls can browse files created with the Stream VFD
(eg. "h5ls <hostname>:<port>").
* h5dump has a new feature "-o <filename>" which outputs the raw data
of the dataset into ascii text file <filename>.
* h5toh4 used to converts hdf5 strings type to hdf4 DFNT_INT8 type.
Corrected to produce hdf4 DFNT_CHAR type instead.
* h5dump and h5ls displays array data correctly.
Bug Fixes since HDF5-1.4.0-beta2
================================
* Fixed a bug in the conversion from a little endian double to a big
endian float in some special cases.
* Corrected configuration error which was not including compression
support correctly.
* Cleaned up lots of warnings.
* Changed a few h5dump command line switches and added long versions of
the switches.
* Changed parameters for H5Tconvert, H5Pset_bufer and H5Pget_buffer from
size_t to hsize_t
* Fixed fairly obscure bug in hyperslab I/O which could (in rare cases)
not copy all the data during a transfer.
* Removed ragged array code from library.
* F90 library and module files are installed properly now on all supported
platforms.
Documentation
=============
* A new document summarizing the changes in the library leading up to
the current release has been added:
HDF5 Software Changes from Release to Release
This document is in the Application Developer's Guide and is of
particular interest to developers who must keep an application
synchronized with the library.
* The documentation for the Fortran90 and C++ APIs is linked to the
opening page of the Reference Manual. Fortran90 functions are
individually referenced from the corresponding C functions through-
out the Reference Manual.
* User's Guide and Reference Manual were updated to reflect changed
function syntax and to fix reported bugs.
* Functions that are new at this release were added to the Reference
Manual.
* Functions that have been removed from the library were removed from
the User's Guide and the Reference Manual.
* PostScript and PDF versions of the Release 1.4 document set are
not available at the time of Release 1.4.0.
Platforms Tested
================
AIX 4.3.3.0 (IBM SP powerpc) xlc 3.6.6
mpcc_r 3.6.6
Cray T3E sn6711 2.0.5.45 Cray Standard C Version 6.4.0.0
Cray Fortran Version 3.4.0.2
Cray SV1 sn9605 10.0.0.7 Cray Standard C Version 6.4.0.0
Cray Fortran Version 3.4.0.2
FreeBSD 4.2 gcc 2.95.2
g++ 2.95.2
HP-UX B.10.20 HP C HP92453-01 A.10.32.30
HP-UX B.11.00 HP C HP92453-01 A.11.00.13
IRIX 6.5 MIPSpro cc 7.30
mpich-1.2.1
IRIX64 6.5 (64 & n32) MIPSpro cc 7.3.1m
mpt.1.4.0.2
mpich-1.2.1
Linux 2.2.16-3smp gcc-2.95.2
g++ 2.95.2
pgf90 3.1-3
mpich-1.2.1
OSF1 V4.0 DEC-V5.2-040
Digital Fortran 90 V4.1-270
SunOS 5.6 WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15 C 5.0
(Solaris 2.6) WorkShop Compilers 5.0 99/10/25 Fortran 90
2.0 Patch 107356-04
Workshop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15 C++ 5.0
SunOS 5.7 WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15 C 5.0
(Solaris 2.7) WorkShop Compilers 5.0 99/10/25 Fortran 90
2.0 Patch 107356-04
Workshop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15 C++ 5.0
mpich-1.2.1
SunOS 5.5.1 gcc-2.7.2
(Solaris 2.5.1 (x86))
TFLOPS r1.0.4 v4.0 mpich-1.2.1 with local changes
Windows NT4.0, 2000 (NT5.0) MSVC++ 6.0
Windows 98 MSVC++ 6.0
Supported Configuration Features Summary
========================================
In the tables below
y = tested and supported
n = not supported or not working in this release
( ) = footnote appears below table
Platform C C F90 F90 C++ Shared zlib Tools
parallel parallel libraries
Solaris2.6 y n y n y y y y
Solaris2.7 y y (1) y n y y y y
Solarisx86 y n n n n y y y
IRIX6.5 y y (1) n n n n y y
IRIX64_6.5 64 y y (2) y y n y y y
IRIX64_6.5 32 y y (2) n n n y y y
HPUX10.20 y n n n n y y y
DECOSF y n y n n y y y
T3E y y y y n n y y
SV1 y n y n n n y y
TFLOPS y y (1) n n n n y y (4)
AIX-4.3 y y n n n n y n
Win2000 y n n n n y y y
Win98 y n n n n y y y
WinNT y n n n n y y y
FreeBSD y n n n y y y y
Linux y y (1) y n y y y y
Platform 1.2 static- Thread- SRB GASS STREAM-
compatibility exec safe VFD
Solaris2.6 y n n n n y
Solaris2.7 y n y n n y
Solarisx86 y n n n n y
IRIX6.5 y n y n n y
IRIX64_6.5 64 y n n n n y
IRIX64_6.5 32 y n n n n y
HPUX10.20 y y n n n y
DECOSF y y n n n y
T3E y y n n n y
SV1 y y n n n y
TFLOPS y y n n n n
AIX-4.3 y y (3) n n n y
Win2000 y y n n n n
Win98 y y n n n n
WinNT y y n n n n
FreeBSD y y n n n y
Linux y n y n n y
Footnotes: (1) Using mpich.
(2) Using mpt and mpich.
(3) When configured with static-exec enabled, tests fail
in serial mode.
(4) No HDF4-related tools.
Known Problems
==============
* The stream-vfd test uses ip port 10007 for testing. If another
application is already using that port address, the test will hang
indefinitely and has to be terminated by the kill command. To try the
test again, change the port address in test/stream_test.c to one not
being used in the host.
* The --enable-static-exec configure flag fails to compile for Solaris
platforms. This is due to the fact that not all of the system
libraries on Solaris are available in a static format.
The --enable-static-exec configure flag also fails to correctly compile
on Linux platforms using the gcc-2.95.2 compiler.
The --enable-static-exec configure flag also fails to correctly compile
on IBM SP2 platform for the serial mode. The parallel mode works fine
with this option.
The compilation fails if configured with --enable-static-exec on IRIX 6.5.
The executable files in hdf5/bin are dynamic-linked for IRIX64 6.5(64 and
n32 modes) and IRIX 6.5, even though they are compiled with static library.
It is suggested that you don't use this option on these platforms
during configuration.
* testhdf5 got bus error with configuration options --prefix and --with-hdf4
on IRIX 6.5.
* With the gcc 2.95.2 compiler, HDF 5 uses the `-ansi' flag during
compilation. The ANSI version of the compiler complains about not being
able to handle the `long long' datatype with the warning:
warning: ANSI C does not support `long long'
This warning is innocuous and can be safely ignored.
* SunOS 5.6 with C WorkShop Compilers 4.2: Hyperslab selections will
fail if library is compiled using optimization of any level.
* When building hdf5 tools and applications on windows platform, a linking
warning: defaultlib "LIBC" conflicts with use of other libs will appear
on debug version when running VC++6.0. This warning doesn't affect building
and testing hdf5 applications. We will continue investigating this.
* h5toh4 converter fails two cases(tstr.h5 and tmany.h5) for release dll
version on windows 2000 and NT. The reason is possibly due to Windows NT
DLL convention on freeing memory. It seems that memory cannot be freed
across library or DLL. It is still under investigation.
* HDF-GASS testings and testhdf5 in the test directory will get bus error if
the configured with --with-gass.
* HDF-SRB testing got segmentation error on Solaris 2.7.
* The Stream VFD was not tested yet under Windows.
It is not supported in the TFLOPS machine.
* Shared library option is broken for IBM SP and some Origin 2000 platforms.
One needs to run ./configure with '--disable-shared --enable-static'.
* The ./dsets tests failed in the TFLOPS machine if the test program,
dsets.c, is compiled with the -O option. The hdf5 library still works
correctly with the -O option. The test program works fine if it is
compiled with -O1 or -O0. Only -O (same as -O2) causes the test
program to fail.
* Certain platforms give false negatives when testing h5ls:
- Solaris x86 2.5.1, Cray T3E and Cray J90 give errors during testing
when displaying object references in certain files. These are benign
differences due to the difference in sizes of the objects created on
those platforms. h5ls appears to be dumping object references
correctly.
- Cray J90 give errors during testing when displaying
some floating-point values. These are benign differences due to the
different precision in the values displayed and h5ls appears to be
dumping floating-point numbers correctly.
* Before building HDF5 F90 Library from source on Crays (T3E and SV1)
replace H5Aff.f90, H5Dff.f90 and H5Pff.f90 files in the fortran/src
subdirectory in the top level directory with the Cray-specific files from
the ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/hdf5-1.4.0/src/crayf90/ directory.
* The h4toh5 utility produces images that do not correctly conform
to the HDF5 Image and Palette Specification.
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/ImageSpec.html
Several required HDF5 attributes are omitted, and the dataspace
is reversed (i.e., the ht. and width of the image dataset is
incorrectly described.) For more information, please see:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/H5Image/ImageDetails.htm
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