[LLVMdev] LLC ARM Backend maintainer

[Tanya Lattner]

On Oct 13, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Raja Venkateswaran wrote:

> I think we need a group of maintainers rather than a single maintainer given the spectrum of ARM targets/ISAs/platforms required to support and the amount of people/system resources required. I & my team plan to actively participate in the bug-fixing process during the release cycle. If we can divide the bugs among the maintainers and establish a requirement that all open ARM bugs must be fixed/addressed (at least analyzed if cannot be fixed) by release time, it will go a long way in ensuring high quality releases for ARM
>  

Its very unrealistic to require that all ARM bugs be fixed for a release. There is no way that this would feasible work and get the release out in a timely manner. You need to have a very concrete list of requirements to consider the release to be qualified for ARM. I suggest looking at we we currently do:
http://llvm.org/docs/HowToReleaseLLVM.html#criteria

Bill is going to update this to reflect us dropping llvm-gcc, but thats the general idea. When determining the release criteria, I would advise starting off small. You don't need to come up with the perfect solution up front. Pick a few tests, bootstrap, and then which processors are to be qualified. 

Once the criteria is established, then continuous testing needs to occur via our buildbot infrastructure. Given our short release cycle, we can't not test something for 6 months and then suddenly decide to test it during the release cycle. Too many surprise bugs will show up and may take a very long time to fix. Its much better to continuously test and have a handful of issues come release time.

Volunteers are needed to be the qualifier for some arch/platform for releases. If someone is interested in filling these roles, please talk to Bill as he is the current release manager.

And as always, we need volunteers to fix release blocker bugs during the release cycle. This has sometimes been big problem during a release cycle and hopefully more will start to get more volunteers. This is why we need continuous testing of release criteria because we just don't have enough volunteers to fix everything at the last minute.

Lastly, anyone can contribute to the ARM backend, so I don't think there is anything really stopping people at the moment for helping "maintain" the ARM backend. Evan is the code owner who approves all changes of course.

Thanks,
Tanya


> --Raja
>  
> From: Joe Abbey [mailto:jabbey at arxan.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 10:01 AM
> To: Renato Golin
> Cc: Anton Korobeynikov; rajav at codeaurora.org; James Molloy; llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] LLC ARM Backend maintainer
>  
> Admittedly we're very interested in becoming ARM backend maintainers as our product heavily relies on LLVM.
>  
> However, we don't have testing resources to test both our product and LLVM on a host of target boards.  We have some chumbys, beagleboards, iPhones, iPod Touches, tables, Android Phones, etc.  And most of those are already booked solid with our own regression tests (most of which are based on llvm-test-suite)
>  
> Could ARM enable us with testing hardware/resources?
>  
> Thanks!
>  
> Joe Abbey
> Software Architect
> Arxan Technologies, Inc.
> 1305 Cumberland Ave, Ste 215
> West Lafayette, IN 47906
> W: 765-889-4756 x2
> C: 765-464-9893
> jabbey at arxan.com
> www.arxan.com
> 
> 
>  
> On Oct 13, 2011, at 12:48 PM, Renato Golin wrote:
> 
> 
> On 11 October 2011 18:22, Anton Korobeynikov <anton at korobeynikov.info> wrote:
> 
> 1. We should define which ARM-related features (in general, e.g.
> platforms, cores, modes, etc.) we consider "release important"
> 2. We should define the conditions how the features in 1. should be tested
> 3. Someone should perform such testing for each release, provide help
> with reproduction of the problems (consider e.g. PR11107, w/o Bill's
> help it would be extremely hard to reproduce the problem, since it
> manifests only on arm/darwin).
> 
> 4. We should be able to guarantee that release-blocking bugs on ARM
> targets will be fixed (if technically possible) before the actual
> release.
> 
> There is no point in define ARM as a release-blocking target if there
> is no commitment in actually fixing release bugs. What keeps ARM on
> the bench is just the lack of general commitment. Somebody has to own
> it, for real.
> 
> cheers,
> --renato
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