Re: Have we become too Intel x64 centered?

From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2021-01-23 15:38:04

On 1/23/21 3:47 PM, Tom Kent via Boost wrote:
> 
> 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).

I appreciate your and all other testers efforts in running the test 
suite, but I must confess that I pay almost no attention to the official 
test matrix these days because:

- No notifications of build/test failures or test completions. Having to 
manually visit the page from time to time is a problem, especially given 
the...
- Slow turnaround times. As I remember, for some testers the turnaround 
time was days and weeks. For others it was better, but still not as good 
as AppVeyor, which usually sends the notification in a few hours after 
the commit.
- Problematic debugging. Often the report shows a failure, but the error 
log is not accessible. This seems to be a long standing problem. This 
makes the whole testing process pointless, as I cannot do anything about 
the failures.

I wish the current testing infrastructure was replaced with something 
more modern, CI-style, as I don't believe the above issues will be fixed 
any time soon.

> 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.

Given that compile times probably dominate the run times, I wonder if it 
would be better to do a cross-compile on x86 and then run on the real 
hardware or a QEMU VM, in terms of test turnaround. I realize that this 
setup is much more complex, but it could be the game changer.