Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
192 lines (126 loc) · 6.04 KB

RELEASE_NOTES.rst

File metadata and controls

192 lines (126 loc) · 6.04 KB
Raw

Release notes for Blosc 1.1.6

Author: Francesc Alted i Abad
Contact: [email protected]
URL:http://blosc.pytables.org

Changes from 1.1.4 to 1.1.5

#XXX version-specific blurb XXX#

Changes from 1.1.4 to 1.1.5

  • Fix compile error with msvc compilers (Christoph Gohlke)

Changes from 1.1.3 to 1.1.4

  • Redefinition of the BLOSC_MAX_BUFFERSIZE constant as (INT_MAX - BLOSC_MAX_OVERHEAD) instead of just INT_MAX. This prevents to produce outputs larger than INT_MAX, which is not supported.
  • exit() call has been replaced by a return -1 in blosc_compress() when checking for buffer sizes. Now programs will not just exit when the buffer is too large, but return a negative code.
  • Improvements in explicit casts. Blosc compiles without warnings (with GCC) now.
  • Lots of improvements in docs, in particular a nice ascii-art diagram of the Blosc format (Valentin Haenel).
  • Improvements to the plot-speeds.py (Valentin Haenel).
  • [HDF5 filter] Adapted HDF5 filter to use HDF5 1.8 by default (Antonio Valentino).
  • [HDF5 filter] New version of H5Z_class_t definition (Antonio Valentino).

Changes from 1.1.2 to 1.1.3

  • Much improved compression ratio when using large blocks (> 64 KB) and high compression levels (> 6) under some circumstances (special data distribution). Closes #7.

Changes from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2

  • Fixes for small typesizes (#6 and #1 of python-blosc).

Changes from 1.1 to 1.1.1

  • Added code to avoid calling blosc_set_nthreads more than necessary. That will improve performance up to 3x or more, specially for small chunksizes (< 1 MB).

Changes from 1.0 to 1.1

  • Added code for emulating pthreads API on Windows. No need to link explicitly with pthreads lib on Windows anymore. However, performance is a somewhat worse because the new emulation layer does not support the pthread_barrier_wait() call natively. But the big improvement in installation easiness is worth this penalty (most specially on 64-bit Windows, where pthreads-win32 support is flaky).
  • New BLOSC_MAX_BUFFERSIZE, BLOSC_MAX_TYPESIZE and BLOSC_MAX_THREADS symbols are available in blosc.h. These can be useful for validating parameters in clients. Thanks to Robert Smallshire for suggesting that.
  • A new BLOSC_MIN_HEADER_LENGTH symbol in blosc.h tells how many bytes long is the minimum length of a Blosc header. blosc_cbuffer_sizes() only needs these bytes to be passed to work correctly.
  • Removed many warnings (related with potentially dangerous type-casting code) issued by MSVC 2008 in 64-bit mode.
  • Fixed a problem with the computation of the blocksize in the Blosc filter for HDF5.
  • Fixed a problem with large datatypes. See http://www.pytables.org/trac/ticket/288 for more info.
  • Now Blosc is able to work well even if you fork an existing process with a pool of threads. Bug discovered when PyTables runs in multiprocess environments. See http://pytables.org/trac/ticket/295 for details.
  • Added a new blosc_getitem() call to allow the retrieval of items in sizes smaller than the complete buffer. That is useful for the carray project, but certainly for others too.

Changes from 0.9.5 to 1.0

  • Added a filter for HDF5 so that people can use Blosc outside PyTables, if they want to.
  • Many small improvements, specially in README files.
  • Do not assume that size_t is uint_32 for every platform.
  • Added more protection for large buffers or in allocation memory routines.
  • The src/ directory has been renamed to blosc/.
  • The maxbytes parameter in blosc_compress() has been renamed to destsize. This is for consistency with the blosc_decompress() parameters.

Changes from 0.9.4 to 0.9.5

  • Now, compression level 0 is allowed, meaning not compression at all. The overhead of this mode will be always BLOSC_MAX_OVERHEAD (16) bytes. This mode actually represents using Blosc as a basic memory container.
  • Supported a new parameter maxbytes for blosc_compress(). It represents a maximum of bytes for output. Tests unit added too.
  • Added 3 new functions for querying different metadata on compressed buffers. A test suite for testing the new API has been added too.

Changes from 0.9.3 to 0.9.4

  • Support for cross-platform big/little endian compatibility in Blosc headers has been added.
  • Fixed several failures exposed by the extremesuite. The problem was a bad check for limits in the buffer size while compressing.
  • Added a new suite in bench.c called debugsuite that is appropriate for debugging purposes. Now, the extremesuite can be used for running the complete (and extremely long) suite.

Changes from 0.9.0 to 0.9.3

  • Fixed several nasty bugs uncovered by the new suites in bench.c. Thanks to Tony Theodore and Gabriel Beckers for their (very) responsive beta testing and feedback.
  • Added several modes (suites), namely suite, hardsuite and extremehardsuite in bench.c so as to allow different levels of testing.

Changes from 0.8.0 to 0.9

  • Internal format version bumped to 2 in order to allow an easy way to indicate that a buffer is being saved uncompressed. This is not supported yet, but it might be in the future.
  • Blosc can use threads now for leveraging the increasing number of multi-core processors out there. See README-threaded.txt for more info.
  • Added a protection for MacOSX so that it has to not link against posix_memalign() funtion, which seems not available in old versions of MacOSX (for example, Tiger). At nay rate, posix_memalign() is not necessary on Mac because 16 bytes alignment is ensured by default. Thanks to Ivan Vilata. Fixes #3.