HDF5 compatibility with GDAL

HDF5 Library
1

Hello. I’m having some trouble with building HDF5 v1.12.0 into GDAL 3.1.0. It’s possible that these aren’t compatible for some reason since HDF5v1.12.0 was released after GDAL 3.1.0 which was released in 2020-05-03.

For some background my application links GDAL dynamically in our Windows 10, Visual Studio 2019 build. I build GDAL with the dynamic HDF5 library which requires that we make the gdal and hdf5 dlls available at run-time. I am able to build GDAL successfully, but when built with HDF5 v1.12.0 GDAL fails to load at run-time for some reason. The reason for that is unclear. I can successfully combine the use of HDF5 v1.10.0 with GDAL 3.1.0.

Question 1: When was HDF5 v1.10.0 released? I cannot find the release notes on the website any longer. I’m trying to determine what was the last version of HDF5 that would have been released before 2024-05-03 when GDAL v3.1.0 was released.

Question 2: Has anyone else tested a newer version that combination of HDF5 v1.12.0 or later with GDAL 3.1.0?

Question 3: How is HDF5 tested with GDAL exactly? Is there a formal process or some documentation that indicates what versions of HDF5 are recommended for use with each version of GDAL? I can’t find anything on the GDAL website that indicates a requirement for a particular version of HDF5. It does seem reasonable that for each version of GDAL that I’d want to prefer a major version of HDF5 that was released before GDAL was to ensure that GDAL isn’t affected by some potentially breaking changes.

2

Interenstingly enough, this webpage has build instructions exactly for the versions you mention: https://www.hdfeos.org/software/gdal.php.

All the usual remarks about using old software versions apply here…

Take care,
Aleksandar

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hdf5_release_history

1 Like
4

Huh. How interesting. I couldn’t figure out how to navigate to that directly but thanks for the link. Based on that, it should work so perhaps it is worth debugging further.

5

Yes, well when we compiled GDAL 3.1.0 for Linux, we experienced seg faults, supposedly fixed in v3.1.2 or later. That could have had something to do with it since we were experiencing something like that on the windows platform. Upgraded to GDAL 3.4.2 on Linux to resolve that seg fault. Now we can’t get GDAL APIS to even read and return metadata from HDF files in the same way. While using old software has its downsides, so does upgrading. If we ever figure this out, I’ll post something to indicate how we solved it.