Re: Have we become too Intel x64 centered?

From: Tom Kent (lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2021-01-23 12:47:39

On Sat, Jan 23, 2021 at 6:14 AM Andrey Semashev via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On 1/23/21 2:20 PM, John Maddock via Boost wrote:
> > I have no solution for this, but I note that neither do we have CI, nor
> > tests on
> > https://www.boost.org/development/tests/develop/developer/summary.html
> > that aren't Intel x86.  The compiler list has shrunk to msvc/clang/gcc
> > as well.
> >
> > I note that at least in theory, other platforms/architectures could be
> > integrated into Drone CI (either the CppAlliance one, or our own), but
> > someone would have to offer to host the clients running the tests.
> >
> > Any thoughts/solutions?
>
> As a maintainer of Boost.Atomic, I would appreciate more hardware
> architectures, especially ARM. The real hardware is not mandatory for
> this, as it could be emulated with QEMU, although the performance would
> suffer (but could still be acceptable). Currently, I'm running this
> setup locally. The question is who is going to run these QEMU VMs in the
> cloud and how much it will cost.
>

I've got a couple raspberry pi 4's that are running tests (slowly, takes
20+hrs to run the test suite...any earlier models just didn't have enough
ram). Look at the teeks99-05* (armv71/armhf) and teeks99-06* (aarch64).

If anyone has access to a RISC-V development board, I'd like to get my
hands on one of those to start running too.

I've debated trying QEMU for more variety, but that has always taken a
back seat to getting the working compilers providing results more quickly.

At one point we had some person/group/company that was targeting android
and had the tests running. That seems like a big hole in what we
test....being the most widely used computing platform and all. Not sure
what would be needed to get that going again.

Tom