[llvm-dev] Proposal: Make the VE target official

[Philip Reames via llvm-dev]

+1 to Renato's points.

One extra point on the build bot is that your cycle time appears to be 
about 30 minutes.  That's not unreasonable, but faster cycles are always 
better (i.e. shorter blame lists).  Any chance you can reduce that time 
via e.g. more hardware or build config tweaks (such as ccache)?  I don't 
mean to suggest this as a blocking item, simple as an area where 
improvement is possible.

Philip

On 11/8/21 7:52 AM, Renato Golin via llvm-dev wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Nov 2021 at 14:56, Simon Moll <Simon.Moll at emea.nec.com 
> <mailto:Simon.Moll at emea.nec.com>> wrote:
>
>     If you look at the build logs of clang-ve-ninja, you will see that the
>     "check all" tests for LLVM+Clang have been passing for a while.
>     What's failing is compiler-rt and we have a patch for that.
>
>
> Right, what we mean by "green bots" is that there should be no 
> conditions for the bot to be considered a success.
>
> Buildbots *must* not only test all known functionality that is 
> expected to work, but they also must not be "red".
>
> This is something that perhaps isn't clear on the new target section 
> of the documents but it's the modus operandi for a long time.
>
> If the bot is red, or turns red easily, it can't be relied upon to 
> convey success in target testing, because you can't expect non-NEC 
> developers to know what's good and what's not, or what should pass and 
> what shouldn't.
>
> It's the responsibility of the bot owner (and ultimately, the target's 
> community), to make sure the bots accurately reflect the quality of 
> the target.
>
> Therefore, a (perhaps undocumented) item on the checklist before 
> moving out of experimental is: the bots must test the target and they 
> must be green and stable (weeks without crashing for spurious reasons).
>
> In VE's case, looking at the earlier builds and seeing that "clang 
> check" passes them all, should be enough to assert history, but before 
> the target is built by everyone else, the bot must be green.
>
>
>     Yes, the compiler-rt tests are failing for well understood reasons
>     (documented in the patch - check-all on LLVM+Clang is green). The
>     patch
>     will make compiler-rt pass on VE by accounting for those (no denorm
>     support, syscall differences).
>     We explicitly include compiler-rt testing (even though it is failing)
>     to have LLVM-compiled code running on the VE in CI.. this is not
>     something we'd do for slick optics.
>
>
> Right, I've done the same thing when turning on the Arm back-end. I 
> built enough buildbots that shown that the target was working on the 
> basic level, then disabled the compiler-rt and test-suite that were 
> not passing with specific bugzilla items for each one, and then with 
> time, I fixed all of them and then all Arm bots were green.
>
> In your case, no other bot (should? will?) build compiler-rt for VE, 
> so this shouldn't hit other bots, which will start building VE once it 
> builds by default.
>
> But your buildbot will still be the *only* bot that build VE proper 
> and uses hardware, so it will be the representative of the VE target.
>
> If it continues red, and it later on problems start to appear in the 
> LIT tests, then other developers will look at your bot, red for ages, 
> and will likely infer that no one cares, and disable the broken test.
>
> Overall, it's much easier if the main bot is green and all the 
> disabled tests have bugzilla entries showing that you are working on it.
>
>     The github repo is for reference only. If you look at our upstream
>     patch history, you will see that we submit small patches with
>     tests and
>     follow the review protocol.
>
>
> I know, that's not what I meant.
>
> My point is that it's really hard to use that branch for reference 
> because of all of the other non-VE stuff that is there too, bundled in 
> a single merge commit.
>
> cheers,
> --renato
>
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