[LLVMdev] ARM Qualification

[Bill Wendling]

On Oct 11, 2011, at 2:43 PM, David A. Greene wrote:

> 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.
> 
Daniel may have the details you need to get this up and running.

-bw

> 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