Re: [boost] Volunteers needed to run regression test reporting

Subject: Re: [boost] Volunteers needed to run regression test reporting
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-01-17 13:59:04

Hi Phil,

> For a while I have been wondering about volunteering an ARM
> Linux machine to run tests; please correct me if I'm wrong,
> but I believe that the current testing is done on x86 and
> one POWER system.
>

AFAIK, that's correct, and it is certainly correct for the reliable testers.

Out of curiosity, does your Linux on ARM system run big endian or little
endian?

I would personally love to have at least one regular Linux tester running
big endian, but that's no big thing.

>
> I have a box with a dual-core Cortex-A15 (Samsung Exynos 5)
> and 2GB of RAM running Debian that is mostly idle.  It currently
> has g++ 4.6 installed.  But could it successfully run the
> tests in a sane period of time without choking?  Has anyone
> observed what the peak RAM requirement is?  What is the
> typical run time on an x86 system?
>

My desktop system under Win7, w/16GB ram, Intel i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz, 4
Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
a full run takes roughly 6 hours or so the first time, but that drops on
subsequent runs. If nothing much has changed, it can be as low as 2 hours.

If it helps, we could set up a light test mode that only tested core
libraries, where core is defined as those a lot of other libraries depend
on. That would eliminate a lot of tests, including a lot that take a long
time to compile or run.

I don't know what memory use is, but have run on a Linux virtual machine
with 2 gigs in the past.

>
> I do have longer term plans for this hardware so it might not
> be available permanently - or it might melt - but I would be
> willing to give it a try.
>
> Are there more up-to-date instructions than those at
> http://beta.boost.org/development/running_regression_tests.html ?
> I have very limited experience with Boost.Build, Boost.Test, git
> or Python so I anticipate needing some hand-holding!
>

Those are the latest. Note that I updated them as recently as this morning.

Good to hear from you,

--Beman