Overview
ESMF 8.4.1 is a patch release that fixes a major issue that was discovered in 8.4.0 after it was released. The identified bug can lead to memory corruption problems, which are often hard to detect and diagnose by their nature. We strongly recommend upgrading applications that are currently using 8.4.0 to patch release 8.4.1.
As a patch release, 8.4.1 does not introduce new features beyond 8.4.0. Besides the major bug fix mentioned above, a number of smaller bug fixes and maintenance work is included with the patch release. See the detailed release notes below. Applications that have already moved to ESMF 8.5.0 beta tags do not need to upgrade to the 8.4.1 patch. For these cases an upgrade to 8.5.0, when officially released, is the recommended next step. All of the fixes that come with patch release 8.4.1 are also available in beta tag v8.5.0b18 and newer.
Release Notes
- This patch release is backward compatible with ESMF 8.4.0.
- No bit-for-bit changes are expected for this release compared to ESMF 8.4.0.
- No changes were made to the ESMF regrid weight generation methods and applications. The ESMF tables summarizing the ESMF regridding status are unchanged.
- A bug in the implementation of method ESMF_FieldGet() was fixed. The problematic code was accessing the optional, intent(out) “name” argument without the proper present() check. As a consequence, code not specifying an actual “name” argument when making this call was at risk of suffering from memory corruption issues. Due to the fact that the ESMF library internally is making calls to ESMF_FieldGet() without passing the “name” argument, it must be assumed that all user code is at risk of memory corruption issues when using ESMF 8.4.0.
- A problem of incorrect ESMPy project metadata was fixed. This issue was causing failures during installation when using python’s setuptools module v67.1.0 or later: (“configuration error:
project.maintainers[{data__maintainers_x}]must not contain {'author'} properties”). The fix allows ESMPy installation to work with the latest setuptools. We recommend this release for anyone doing a new installation of ESMPy. - The NUOPC_Driver code responsible for stepping components through the initialization protocol has been optimized to reduce the amount of synchronization needed between components. This allows for a greater level of concurrency between components during initialization, resulting in a reduction of execution time.
- A number of code adjustments were made to support Intel’s LLVM based OneAPI compiler suite under the common ESMF_COMPILER=intel setting. Classic and OneAPI Intel compiler flavors are now supported under the same setting.
Known Issues
- Same as 8.4.0.
Documentation
- ESMF Reference Manual for Fortran
- ESMF Reference Manual for C
- ESMF User Guide
- NUOPC Layer Reference
- Building a NUOPC Model
- ESMPy Doc