[LLVMdev] ARM Qualification

[David A. Greene]

Bill Wendling <wendling at apple.com> writes:

> Improving the test suite is always welcome.

Do we have an idea of what sorts of improvements we'd like?  Any codes
that we want to add, for example?  What would be useful for ARM?

> In addition, we send out pre-release tarballs and have people in the
> community build and test their programs with it. This is not a perfect
> system, but it's one which works for us given the number of testers
> available, the amount of time and resources they have, and whatever
> fixes need to be merged into the release.
>
> ARM qualification is a bit trickier, because of the different specific
> chips out there, different OSes, and having to verify ARM, Thumb1, and
> Thumb2 for the same configurations. And the tests tend to run a bit
> slower than, say, an x86 chip. So it's mostly a matter of time and
> resources. Unless we can get people who are willing to perform these
> tests, we won't be able to release ARM as an official supported
> platform.

Resources isn't the only problem.  I've asked several times about adding
my personal machines to the testing pool but I never get a reply.  So
there they sit idle every day, processing the occasional e-mail when
they could be chewing LLVM tests.

It is in fact highly in my own interest to get them running.  I just
need to be pointed to the document that tells me what the buildbot
master expects to see and defines a procedure for adding them as slaves.

One thing that could help these situations is virtualization.

I've toyed with the idea of setting up various virtual machines to test
various OS/architecture combinations.  With QEMU I can imagine testing
various ISAs as well.

If there are any ARM full-system simulators we could use those as well.
I'd be happy to run them.

                              -Dave