HDF Newsletter 74

October 24, 2003


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Release of HDF5-1.6.1

New Features and Changes
Platforms Tested
Known Problems

Release of HDF5-1.6.1

HDF5-1.6.1 is now available for download from the NCSA HDF5 home page at:

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/

The HDF5 documentation is included in the source code and can also be accessed from:

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/

This is a fully tested release. The configuration features supported in this release can be viewed at:

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/SuppConfigFeats.html

The RELEASE.txt file in the source code contains detailed information about this release:

   ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/current/src/unpacked/release_docs/RELEASE.txt

For information on functions that have changed in HDF5-1.6.1, see:

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/ADGuide/Changes.html

New Features and Changes

The major new features and changes in HDF5-1.6.1 are:

Added new H5Fget_freespace() routine to query the free space in a file.
Added a few new C++ functions.
Added support for gcc 3.3.1.
Fortran90 APIs are being integrated into the main body of the HDF5 Reference Manual (RM). This process is complete in all RM sections except H5P.
Many bugs were fixed in this release, including the following:
- Fixed potential file corruption bug when too many object header messages (probably attributes, from a user perspective) were inserted into an object header and certain other conditions were met.
- Corrected some problems with variable-length datatypes.
- Corrected some problems with the H5Tget_native_type function.
- Corrected bug where H5Gunlink caused file corruption.
- Corrected errors with using point selections to access data in chunked datasets.
- Modified library and file format to support storing indexed storage (chunked dataset) B-tree's with non-default internal 'K' values.
- Fixed the error that caused "make install" to fail because of the macro definition syntax of "prefix?=..."

Many other changes are also included in this release. Please refer to the RELEASE.txt file in the source code for a comprehensive list of changes.

Platforms Tested

  AIX 
  Cray T3E, SV1, T90IEEE
  FreeBSD 
  HP-UX 
  IRIX 
  IRIX64 (32 and 64 bit)
  Linux 
  OSF1 
  Solaris (32 and 64 bit)
  TFLOPS
  IA-32 
  IA-64
  Windows 
  Mac OS X

For further information please refer to the following page (or the RELEASE.txt file):

    http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/platforms5.html

Known Problems

Known problems at release time are listed in the RELEASE.txt file that comes with the source code.

Further information on known problems can be found on the following page:

  http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/known_problems5.html

HDF Newsletter 74

CONTENTS

Release of HDF5-1.6.1

New Features and Changes

Platforms Tested

Known Problems