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

Subject: Re: [boost] Volunteers needed to run regression test reporting
From: Phil Endecott (spam_from_boost_dev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-01-19 11:34:51

Phil Endecott wrote:
> 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?

I seem to have run the regression tests successfully and the results
are shown as "exynos5" at
http://www.boost.org/development/tests/develop/developer/summary.html
There are a handful of test failures that do not seem to happen on
other platforms.  Library maintainers are welcome to ask me if they
think there is anything platform-specific that needs investigation.

It took about 16 hours to run.

The only issues that I encountered were:
- I set LANG=C to suppress some messages from Perl; I've had to do
this on other occasions on this machine, so it's probably not an
issue with the scripts.
- I tried toolset=gcc-4.6.3 and got an incomprehensible error; I
used toolset=gcc in the end.  I suspect I should have just used
toolset=gcc-4.6.  It might be worthwhile to explicitly validate
the toolset arg and give a better error message.
- It only seemed to be using one CPU.  Is there something that I
can do to make it use both?

I will look into doing this from a cron job.  How often is it
actually useful to run them?

Some other notes:

- This is a little-endian system.  I haven't seem anyone using
ARM in big-endian mode for quite a few years now.

- It would be great to run tests on iOS.  The way the devices are
locked down makes this difficult.  The best solution is probably
to use a jailbroken device, and to use ssh to copy the test
executables over and run them.

- For Android, I'd also suggest cross-compiling and copying the
test executables onto a device - and in this case it can be done
without having to crack the hardware.  Ideally much of this
could be shared between Android and iOS.

- I will probably install llvm as well, not least because that
is rather closer to Apple's iOS cross compiler.

- ARMv8, i.e. 64-bit ARM, will be the next challenge - once I
have suitable hardware!

Regards,  Phil.