HDF Newsletter 88

July 18, 2006

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CONTENTS

Corruption Bug in HDF5

An extremely rare corruption problem has been discovered in the HDF5-1.6.5 and earlier releases, as well as in the HDF5-1.8.0 Alpha 1-3 releases. After attributes are added and deleted more than once, an incorrect count of the number of messages may get recorded in an object header.

If you open an object and receive errors similar to the following, then that object has been affected by this problem: "unable to load entry" or "corrupt object header - too few messages"

A tool is available for fixing this problem. The source code for this tool and a few binaries (for AIX, Linux, Solaris, and Windows) can be obtained from the following location:

ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/special_tools/

This problem has been fixed in the HDF5-1.8.0 Alpha 4 release and the HDF5-1.6.6-snap0 development snapshot. This release and snapshot have not been tested on all supported platforms. Please refer to the RELEASE.txt file that comes with them for more information on this problem.

The 1.6.6-snap0 snapshot can be obtained from:

ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/pub/outgoing/hdf5/snapshots/

Information on the 1.8.0 Alpha 4 release is described below.

Please contact the HDF Helpdesk if you have any questions or concerns regarding this issue.

Release of HDF5-1.8.0 Alpha 4

The HDF5-1.8.0 Alpha 4 release is available from:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/release/alpha/obtain518.html

Please refer to the following document for what is new in the Alpha releases:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc_1.8pre/WhatsNew180.html

The RELEASE.txt file for 1.8.0 Alpha 4 is available at:

ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/pub/outgoing/hdf5/hdf5-1.8.0-pre/hdf5-1.8.0-alpha4-RELEASE.txt
Note that the corruption problem described in the section above IS fixed in this release.

Any Interest in C# API ?

If you are interested in a C# API for HDF5, please let us know.

A few users have asked about this, and we want to determine what the level of interest is among all HDF5 users.