FloPoCo installation manual

• Installation on Linux or MacOS (recommended if you want to hack flopoco)
• Installation by Docker (recommended if you want to use flopoco)
• Installation in Windows

Operators tend to come and go as we struggle to support them, and we apologize for that. Hopefully the new Autotest features will bring more stability. Meanwhile, it is possible that the operator you want works better in an older version: read the release notes.

Installation in Ubuntu and other Debian derivative

Versions (most recent on top)

Bleeding edge git master version

Recommended is the install script for the full version with all optional dependencies.

Version 4.1.2, the last one with the old pipelining framework

See the install script . It was written for ubuntu 16.04 (xenial), and is probably broken on more recent versions. In this case you can install it in a virtual machine using Vagrant as follows:

vagrant init ubuntu/xenial64 && vagrant up
vagrant ssh

# the following happens in the virtual machine
wget http://flopoco.org/install_scripts/install-plain-4.1.2-on-xenial64.sh
sh install-plain-4.1.2-on-xenial64.sh

Version 2.5.0, the last version before the transition to Sollya4 broke everything that bit heaps had not yet broken

Version 2.3.2, the last version before the Great Leader embarked the project in the bit heap hazardous adventure

Older versions may include operators that have later been deprecated. See the Release Notes

Dependencies

For non-Debian systems, the installation script and the CMakeList.txt will give you an idea of the dependencies to install, in particular: Sollya (mandatory, used in a lot of operators), WCPG (optional, used in the FixIIR operator), and ScaLP (optional, will improve the quality of many operators).

ScaLP provides a uniform interface to several ILP solver. The instructions provided build ScaLP with the LPSolve back-end, which is the only backend for which installation can be fully automated. Better results may be obtained using other backends: SCIP, Gurobi (both freely available for academic purpose) or CPlex. You are therefore encouraged to download one of these, install it, then recompile ScaLP (adding the relevant arguments to its cmake command, see ScaLP documentation), then FloPoCo.

Installation by Docker

• Install Docker on your computer.
  • On Debian/Ubuntu,

    apt install docker.io
    sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}

  • For Windows, see docker.com
• Download the Dockerfile corresponding to the version you want:
  • Dockerfile.2.5.0
  • Dockerfile.4.1.2
  • Dockerfile.plain.gitmaster
  • Dockerfile.full.gitmaster
• Place it in an otherwise empty directory
• then cd to this directory and type the following command:

  docker build -t flopoco -f Dockerfile.4.1.2 .

  (replace Dockerfile.4.1.2 with the one you selected)
• The following command sets up a convenient alias (in linux)

  alias flopoco="docker run --rm=true -v `pwd`:/flopoco_workspace flopoco"

  Now if you type for instance

  flopoco FPAdd we=8 wf=23

you will obtain in the current directory a flopoco.vhdl file containing a single-precision floating-point adder.

Installation in Windows

The following instructions predate WSL. If you have a recent WSL, the Ubuntu instructions should work.

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant
• A SSH Client. If you are running Linux or Mac, you already have one. If you are using Windows, I recommended you "Putty".

Installing Ubuntu in a Vagrant virtual box

Create a folder where you want to contain all the Vagrant files.

Open a command prompt and go into this folder. If you are using windows, you can quickly open a command prompt by holding down shift and right-clicking the project folder, then choose “open command window here”.

Now type the following commands :

vagrant init ubuntu/focal64

vagrant up

Connecting to the virtual machine by SSH

• Using your favorite ssh client, connect to your virtual machine with the following parameters :
  • Adress : 127.0.0.1
  • Port : The port is given during the execution of "vagrant up". By default 2222.
  • Login : vagrant
  • Password : vagrant
• You can also try to type "vagrant ssh" in your prompt, sometime it works. The result is the same thing.

Installing Flopoco on your virtual machine

Some common problems

• You can not acess the VM using SSH : open VirtualBox, click right on your Vagrant Machine in the list, and shutdown and restart the VM.
• During the execution of "vagrant up", the script loops trying to access the Vm using ssh : Don't worry (be happy), Stop the script. And restart your virtual machine directly into VirtualBox.
• If you have some problems when "vagrant up" and using Linux, try to run the commands as root.
• The single-line installation script hangs, possibly with a lot of "y" in the terminal: just reboot the virtual machine and start again. It works the second time.
• If nothing work, just reboot your computer. Reboot solves more or less everything.