[cfe-dev] [llvm-dev] Testing Best Practices/Goals (in the context of compiler-rt)

[David Blaikie via cfe-dev]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:33 PM, Xinliang David Li via cfe-dev <
cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:11 PM, Justin Bogner via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> David Blaikie via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> writes:
>> > Recently had a bit of a digression in a review thread related to some
>> tests
>> > going in to compiler-rt (
>> >
>> http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20160208/330759.html
>> > ) and there seems to be some disconnect at least between my expectations
>> > and reality. So I figured I'd have a bit of a discussion out here on the
>> > dev lists where there's a bit more visibility.
>> >
>> > My basic expectation is that the lit tests in any LLVM project except
>> the
>> > test-suite are targeted tests intended to test only the functionality in
>> > the project. This seems like a pretty well accepted doctrine across most
>> > LLVM projects - most visibly in Clang, where we make a concerted effort
>> not
>> > to have tests that execute LLVM optimizations, etc.
>> >
>> > There are exceptions/middle ground to this - DIBuilder is in LLVM, but
>> > essentially tested in Clang rather than writing LLVM unit tests. It's
>> > somewhat unavoidable that any of the IR building code (IRBuilder,
>> > DIBuilder, IR asm printing, etc) is 'tested' incidentally in Clang in
>> > process of testing Clang's IR generation. But these are seen as
>> incidental,
>> > not intentionally trying to cover LLVM with Clang tests (we don't add a
>> > Clang test if we add a new feature to IRBuilder just to test the
>> IRBuilder).
>> >
>> > Another case with some middle ground are things like linker tests and
>> > objdump, dwarfdump, etc - in theory to isolate the test we would checkin
>> > binaries (or the textual object representation lld had for a while,
>> etc) to
>> > test those tools. Some tests instead checkin assembly and assemble it
>> with
>> > llvm-mc. Again, not to cover llvm-mc, but on the assumption that
>> llvm-mc is
>> > tested, and just using it as a tool to make tests easier to maintain.
>> >
>> > So I was surprised to find that the compiler-rt lit tests seem to
>> diverge
>> > from this philosophy & contain more intentional end-to-end tests (eg:
>> > adding a test there when making a fix to Clang to add a counter to a
>> > function that was otherwise missing a counter - I'd expect that to be
>> > tested in Clang and that there would already be coverage in compiler-rt
>> for
>> > "if a function has a counter, does compiler-rt do the right thing with
>> that
>> > counter" (testing whatever code in compiler-rt needs to be tested)).
>> >
>> > Am I off base here? Are compiler-rt's tests fundamentally different to
>> the
>> > rest of the LLVM project? Why? Should they continue to be?
>>
>> I think there's a bit of grey area in terms testing the runtime -
>> generally it's pretty hard to use the runtime without a fairly
>> end-to-end test, so tests of the runtime often end up looking pretty
>> close to an end-to-end test.
>>
>> That said, I don't think that should be used as an excuse to sneak
>> arbitrary end-to-end tests into compiler-rt. We should absolutely write
>> tests in clang and llvm that we're inputting what we expect to the
>> runtime and try to keep the tests in compiler-rt as focused on just
>> exercising the runtime code as possible.
>>
>
> Yes, we should not use compiler-rt tests as an excuse of not adding
> clang/LLVM test. The latter should always be added if possible -- they are
> platform independent and is the first level of defense.  runtime test's
> focus is also more on the runtime lib itself and interaction between
>  runtime, compiler, binutils and other tools.
>

This latter bit is where there's some disagreement.

The LLVM project generally expects the "make check" style tests to be fast
and narrow in scope - LLVM tests test LLVM, Clang tests Clang, and it would
seem compiler-rt tests should be just about testing the runtime lib,
specifically. Sure, that means making sure it can handle the diversity of
input/output, etc. But if two inputs to Clang produce the same output we
only write one LLVM test for that output and I would expect the same of
compiler-rt - if two inputs to Clang produce the same sort of output (a
function with a counter, in the example we started with) I'd expect only
one test for compiler-rt, to check that it can handle a function with a
counter.

(generally: if a change wasn't made to compiler-rt, I wouldn't expect a
test to be added (except to makeup for cases of missing compiler-rt
coverage))


>
> David
>
>>
>> IIUC, the correct place for integration tests in general is somewhere
>> like test-suite, but I think it's a bit intimidating to some people to
>> add new tests there (Are there docs on this?). I suspect some of the
>> profiling related tests in compiler-rt are doing a bit much and should
>> graduate to a spot in the test-suite (but I don't have time to volunteer
>> to do the work, unfortunately).
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