Re: gprofng testing

[Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>]

Hi Vladimir,

>>> The size of experiments can be big.

>> With difficulty.  The size of the experiment files will be an obstacle
>> I expect.  Is it possible to instead provide a source file and have the
>> test compile it first instead ?
> 
> This is exactly what we have now in binutils-gdb.git.
> We compare the time for each function in the application output and the gprofng report.
> The small discrepancy is OK.
> 
> But we cannot check the correctness of the gprofng report, such as the correct alignment of metrics or the order of functions.

Why not ?  How about instead of compiling examples, you start with
assembler sources (possibly based upon compiled source code).  This
would remove any dependencies upon compiler behaviour, code layout
and so on.


>> Assuming that the answer to that question is no, then is it possible
>> to create smaller test cases, or to compress the test files files and
>> then decompress them when they are being used ?
>   Is 2-4 megabyte small ?

No. :-(

> In any case, it was only on large experiments that we saw problems with the synchronization and reallocation of our tables.

Well at least you caught these problems yourselves.


> Is there a big public test suite for gdb (or any other binutils/gcc components) ?

No.

Well unless you consider the various Linux and BSD distributions to testsuites.
After all if you put a broken linker into the build root of a distribution you
quickly get a lot of people complaining at you.  (I speak from experience...)

But basically the answer is that there is currently nowhere that hosts large
tests of any of the GNU tools.  It would be nice to have such a resource, of
course, but I do not see one appearing soon.

Cheers
   Nick