RHBA-2013:1587 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated papi packages that fix several bugs and add various enhancements are now
available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

PAPI (Performance Application Programming Interface) is a software library that
provides access to the processor's performance-monitoring hardware. This allows
developers to track performance-related events, such as cache misses,
instructions retired, and clock cycles, to better understand the performance
issues of the software.

The papi packages have been upgraded to upstream version 5.1.1, which provides a
number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version, including
support for Intel Xeon Processor E5-XXXX v2 architecture. (BZ#831751)

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Due to missing dependencies in the makefile, a parallel rebuild of the PAPI

library failed. With this update, new rules have been added to the makefile to
address this problem. As a result, PAPI can be successfully rebuild in the
described scenario. (BZ#740909)

• Previously, when Hyper-threading was enabled on the Intel Xeon Processor

E5-XXXX node, the PAPI libary could not configure the performance-monitoring
hardware to count floating-point operations. This bug has been fixed and the
aforementioned error no longer occurs. (BZ#785258)

• Due to an incorrect ldconfig setting in the papi.spec file, papi failed to be

rebuilt from the srpm file when the process was executed by the root user. With
this update, the underlying source code has been modified to fix this bug.
(BZ#883475)

• Previously, the papi package failed to be built from the srpm file when a

previous version of papi was installed. During the build, the new version of
papi attempted to link to the libpfm.so file of the previously installed
papi-devel package, which caused papi to terminate unexpectedly. With this
update, a patch has been introduced to reorder the sequence of file linking
during the build, so that the locally built files are used first. As a result,
papi is built correctly with previous version installed. (BZ#883766)

This update also adds the following enhancements:

• Support for the Intel Xeon Processor E5-XXXX and Intel Xeon Processor E5-XXXX

architectures has been added to the PAPI library. (BZ#726798, BZ#831751,
BZ#947622)

• Support for access to various energy and performance registers through PAPI

has been added. (BZ#743648)

• With this update, several minor grammatical errors have been corrected in the

PAPI interface. (BZ#785975)

• The papi-static subpackage has been added to provide the libraries for static

linking. (BZ#866590)

• The papi-testsuite subpackage has been added to allow testing of papi.

(BZ#910163)

All users of papi are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix
these bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to
use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension 6 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 740909 - rebuild fails using parallel build

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)