Installing PMDK from Source on Linux

Overview

This procedure describes how to clone the source code from the pmdk github repository and compile, then install it.

Note: We recommend installing NDCTL first so PMDK builds all features. If the ndctl development packages and header files are not installed, PMDK will build successfully, but will disable some of the RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) features.

If your system is behind a firewall and requires a proxy to access the Internet, configure your package manager to use a proxy.

Install Prerequisites

To build the PMDK libraries on Linux, you may need to install the following required packages on the build system:

• autoconf

• automake

• gcc

• gcc-c++

• glib2-devel

• libfabric-devel

• pandoc

• pkg-config

• ncurses-devel

Fedora

$ sudo dnf install autoconf automake pkg-config glib2-devel libfabric-devel pandoc ncurses-devel

RHEL/CentOS

Ubuntu & Debian

FreeBSD

The git utility is required to clone the repository or you can download the source code as a zip file directly from the repository on GitHub.

Optional Prerequisites

The following packages are required only by selected PMDK components or features. If not present, those components or features may not be available:

• libfabric (v1.4.2 or later) -- required by librpmem

• libndctl and libdaxctl (v60.1 or later) -- required by daxio and RAS features. See Installing NDCTL

  • To build pmdk without ndctl support, set 'NDCTL_ENABLE=n' using: $ export NDCTL_ENABLE=n

Compiler Requirements

A C/C++ Compiler is required. GCC/G++ will be used in this documentation but you may use a different compiler then set the CC and CXX shell environments accordingly.

Fedora

$ sudo dnf install gcc gcc-c++

RHELCentOS

Ubuntu/Debian

Clone the PMDK GitHub Repository

The following uses the git utility to clone the repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/pmem/pmdk
$ cd pmdk

Alternatively you may download the source code as a zip file from the GitHub website.

$ wget https://github.com/pmem/pmdk/archive/master.zip
$ unzip master.zip
$ cd pmdk-master

Compile

Linux & FreeBSD

To build the master branch run the make utility in the root directory:

$ make

If you want to compile with a different compiler, you have to provide the CC and CXXvariables. For example:

$ make CC=clang CXX=clang++

These variables are independent and setting CC=clang does not set CXX=clang++.

If the make command returns an error similar to the following, this is caused by pkg-config being unable to find the required "libndctl.pc" file.

$ make
src/common.inc:370: *** libndctl(version >= 60.1) is missing -- see README.  Stop.

This can occur when libndctl was installed in a directory other than the /usr location.

To resolve this issue, the PKG_CONFIG_PATH is a environment variable that specifies additional paths in which pkg-config will search for its .pc files.

This variable is used to augment pkg-config's default search path. On a typical Unix system, it will search in the directories /usr/lib/pkgconfig and /usr/share/pkgconfig. This will usually cover system installed modules. However, some local modules may be installed in a different prefix such as /usr/local. In that case, it's necessary to prepend the search path so that pkg-config can locate the .pc files.

The pkg-config program is used to retrieve information about installed libraries in the system. The primary use of pkg-config is to provide the necessary details for compiling and linking a program to a library. This metadata is stored in pkg-config files. These files have the suffix .pc and reside in specific locations known to the pkg-config tool.

To check the PKG_CONFIG_PATH value use this command:

$ echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH

To set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH value use:

$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}

Now execute the make command again.

Install

Installing the library is more convenient since it installs man pages and libraries in the standard system locations.

Linux & FreeBSD

To install the libraries to the default /usr/local location:

$ sudo make install

To install this library into other locations, you can use the prefix=path option, e.g:

$ sudo make install prefix=/usr

If you installed to non-standard directory (anything other than /usr) you may need to add $prefix/lib or $prefix/lib64 (depending on the distribution you use) to the list of directories searched by the linker:

sudo sh -c "echo /usr/local/lib >> /etc/ld.so.conf"
sudo sh -c "echo /usr/local/lib64 >> /etc/ld.so.conf"
sudo ldconfig