Re: [Boost-users] [MPI] missing symbols using serialization's static library design

Barrett, Brian W wrote:

Hello all -

On Mac OS X Lion, we're seeing errors when linking our application using Boost.MPI. The application is rather large and uses Boost.Serialization for both checkpoint/restart and MPI communication. The checkpoint/restart bits made serialization a bit of a disaster in terms of compile times (due to headers including basically every other header in the project). To solve that problem, we followed the Boost.Serialization advice on static libraries, and all is good.

Except that on Lion (and possibly elsewhere, but definitely on Lion) using the gcc front-end (i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2336.11.00)), we're seeing link failures due to serialization calls for MPI archivers not being found when compiling with -O2 or higher on Boost 1.50.0 and 1.51.0:

CXXLD sst.x Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64: "void SST::Introspector::serializeboost::mpi::packed_iarchive(boost::mpi::packe d_iarchive&, unsigned int)", referenced from: boost::archive::detail::iserializer::load_object_data(boost::archive::detail::basic_iarchive &, void*, unsigned int) const in introspectedComponent.o boost::archive::detail::iserializer::load_object_data(boost::archive::detail::basic_iarchive &, void*, unsigned int) consti n simulation.o

While I could simply explicitly insatiate the missing archivers, that seems like a bad idea for something in the detail namespace and it appears that the list of archivers I'd need to instantiate has changed over time. Is there a better solution to the problem?

There's a test case the exhibits the problem available here on our Google code project bug tracker. It's essentially the Boost.Serialization demo_pimpl example, but using MPI instead of a text archiver. The code is at:

http://sst-simulator.googlecode.com/issues/attachment?aid=280000000&name=mp i_serialization_test.tar.gz&token=1MTkBuFrhrfUUAZRZYH3kZrElIg%3A13500682075 60

I'm guessing that one will need to explicitly initialilze some stuff in the mpi archives static library. This is done for the other serialization static libraries. I would compare the mpi serialization build against the other archive build and see which, if any explicit instantiations are in one but not the other.

Thanks,

Brian