[LLVMdev] Call for Help: Testing

[Török Edwin]

On 04/06/2010 10:55 PM, David Greene wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 April 2010 14:47:37 Dustin Laurence wrote:
>> On 04/06/2010 12:38 PM, David Greene wrote:
>>> ...Either this or
>>> virtualization would work but both are complicated to set up, raising the
>>> bar to participate.
>> Is it?  I don't really know anything about it, but on a whim read just
>> enough to know the name of the user-space manager program I needed,
>> installed the tools on Fedora 12, created a virtual machine by following
>> the on-screen directions, and installing from a Debian 32-bit .iso.  It
>> couldn't have been simpler without someone else actually using the mouse
>> for me. :-)
> 
> Which manager are you using?  I had a heck of a time setting up virt-manager.
> Perhaps Fedora does a better job integrating it than Debian.  It wouldn't
> surprise me.  I'm glad it's easy somewhere.  :)

kvm seems to work fine lately on Debian:
kvm-img create foo.img 4G
kvm -hda foo.img -cdrom /path/to/release.iso -m 1024

> 
>>> It strikes me that we also have an issue with gcc version.  As
>>> demonstrated by PR6616, compiler versions matter.  It seems we will need
>>> to settle on a standard compiler for each release to avoid some of the
>>> confusion that can delay releases.  What do the buildbots use? 
>>> Unfortunately, this again makes things more complicated as it requires
>>> testers to install specific versions of compilers.  Linux distributions
>>> don't always make that easy.
>> Wouldn't the rest of the build environment also matter?
> 
> To a point, yes, but the compiler is the biggest factor, I think.  I
> don't imagine libc would mess things up too often, although a libstdc++
> difference (I suspect) did prevent me from seeing a build failure recently.
> 
>> Another nice thing about virtual images is you can have many per actual
>> machine, provided you go to the trouble of installing them.  You can
> 
> Right.

There are also some free build farms that you may use.
Besides the GCC compile farm, there is the OpenSUSE build service
(build.opensuse.org) that has an autobuilder for several Linux
distributions/architectures.
Its a bit complicated to automate though (you need to commit the sources
you want built, rather than having them pulled from somewhere), also it
wants a rpm build script (but you can run make check from the rpm build
script).
And if you care about Solaris, opencsw.org has a buildfarm where you may
request access
((http://www-mockup.opencsw.org/extend-it/signup/to-upstream-maintainers/)

IMHO the best way to get more widespread testing on Linux would be to
make llvm/clang able to fully build the kernel, (e)glibc, and other
essential software so that one can try to rebuild the full system with
clang.

Or at least have some wrappers that build using clang usually, and falls
back to gcc for not supported flags (like
-fno-toplevel-reorder/-fno-unit-at-a-time).

If that works then maybe there would be a distribution that offers an
easy way to rebuild your system (like Gentoo) that could be used to test
LLVM.

Best regards,
--Edwin