RcppParallel on FreeBSD didn't compile the included TBB lib?

[jszhao]

Today, I try to install rstan on FreeBSD, and got error like:

...
rstan.so: Undefined symbol "_ZN3tbb8internal26task_scheduler_observer_v37observeEb"
...

(please refer to rstan fails to be installed on FreeBSD)

After some struggle, we located the issue come from libtbb is not linked to rstan.so. And libtbb is assumed to be provided by RcppParallel. However, I inspected the libs installed by RcppParallel, and did not find tbb related libs. And LdFlags() return nothing.

I don't know how to configure RcppParallel during installation in order to make it to install the tbb libs. or tbb is not supported by FreeBSD? In fact, there is a package call tbb-2020.3 in the pkg system of FreeBSD.

[kevinushey]

Compilation of TBB on FreeBSD isn't enabled, simply because we weren't able to find the time to test and make sure that works. This is where we toggle compilation of TBB (via the USE_TBB make variable):

RcppParallel/src/Makevars.in

Lines 5 to 48 in 394a729

	ifeq ($(OS), Windows_NT)
	USE_TBB=Windows
	TBB_COPY_PATTERN=tbb*.dll
	MAKE = make
	MAKEFLAGS = -e -s -j1
	MAKE_CMD = \
	MSYS2_ARG_CONV_EXCL="*" \
	CYGWIN=nodosfilewarning \
	CONLY="@WINDOWS_CC@" \
	CPLUS="@WINDOWS_CXX11@" \
	CXXFLAGS="@CXX11FLAGS@ -DTBB_NO_LEGACY=1" \
	PIC_KEY="@CXX11PICFLAGS@" \
	WARNING_SUPPRESS="" \
	$(MAKE)
	else
	UNAME := $(shell uname)
	TBB_COPY_PATTERN=libtbb*.*
	ifeq ($(UNAME), Darwin)
	USE_TBB=Mac
	endif
	ifeq ($(UNAME), Linux)
	USE_TBB=Linux
	endif
	ifeq ($(UNAME), SunOS)
	SUNOS_ARCH = $(shell uname -p)
	ifeq ($(SUNOS_ARCH), i386)
	USE_TBB=SunOS
	endif
	endif
	MAKEFLAGS += -e -s
	MAKE_CMD = \
	CONLY="@CC@ $(PKG_CPPFLAGS) @CPPFLAGS@" \
	CPLUS="@CXX11@ $(PKG_CPPFLAGS) @CPPFLAGS@" \
	CXXFLAGS="@CXX11FLAGS@ -DTBB_NO_LEGACY=1" \
	PIC_KEY="@CXX11PICFLAGS@" \
	WARNING_SUPPRESS="" \
	$(MAKE)
	endif

And this is where we indicate to the C preprocessor whether we're using TBB:

RcppParallel/inst/include/RcppParallel.h

Lines 8 to 18 in 394a729

	// Use TBB only where it's known to compile and work correctly
	// (NOTE: Windows TBB is temporarily opt-in for packages for
	// compatibility with CRAN packages not previously configured
	// to link to TBB in Makevars.win)
	#ifndef RCPP_PARALLEL_USE_TBB
	# if defined(__APPLE__) || defined(__gnu_linux__) || (defined(__sun) && defined(__SVR4) && !defined(__sparc))
	# define RCPP_PARALLEL_USE_TBB 1
	# else
	# define RCPP_PARALLEL_USE_TBB 0
	# endif
	#endif

A PR would be appreciated to enable TBB support on FreeBSD.

[jszhao]

Thanks for the response. It's not easy to patch the source of tbb itself to work on FreeBSD. I have patch the file you mentioned, but errors appear during the compilation of tbb lib. Because there is a package on FreeBSD, named tbb-2020.3. Is it possible to tweak RcppParallel to use the installed tbb libs? Thanks!

[kevinushey]

It should be possible to patch RcppParallel to use a system-install of TBB -- in fact, Debian does exactly that:

https://sources.debian.org/patches/r-cran-rcppparallel/5.0.2+dfsg-1/use_debian_packaged_libtbb.patch/

I'd like to eventually port a patch like this over to RcppParallel, but haven't yet found the time to do so.

[eddelbuettel]

Yes, nice plan! This is being done in a few packages. nloptr is one (for which I wrote that configure logic).

[kevinushey]

It should now be possible to handle this with the latest release of RcppParallel. You can do something like:

export TBB_LIB=/path/to/tbb/lib
export TBB_INC=/path/to/tbb/inc
R CMD INSTALL RcppParallel

and RcppParallel will instead use the version of TBB you have directed it to, rather than its bundled version. Feel free to re-open if you're still having trouble.

[jszhao]

It should now be possible to handle this with the latest release of RcppParallel. You can do something like:

export TBB_LIB=/path/to/tbb/lib
export TBB_INC=/path/to/tbb/inc
R CMD INSTALL RcppParallel

Thanks a lot for fixing this issue.

Is it possible to install the package in R console using "install.packages". I don't know how to pass the environmental variable TBB_LIB and TBB_INC into the function.

[kevinushey]

Yes, you can use Sys.setenv(); e.g.

Sys.setenv(TBB_LIB = "/path/to/tbb/lib")
Sys.setenv(TBB_INC = "/path/to/tbb/include")
install.packages("RcppParallel", type = "source")

[jszhao]

@kevinushey Thanks a lot. It works.

[kevinushey]

Great, glad to hear it!