Re: Adding binutils to the GNU Toolchain buildbot on sourceware

["H.J. Lu" <hjl.tools@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 6:49 AM Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com> wrote:
>
> On 26.04.2022 14:27, Nick Clifton wrote:
> >> For gas/testsuite/gas/i386/rept I did already suggest [1] to simply purge
> >> the test as unreliable. I also put under question the purpose that it was
> >> originally added for.
> >>
> >> [1] https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2022-April/120339.html
> >
> > Hmm, I seem to have missed this one.  In fact the entire patch series.  Sorry.
> > The series looks good to me, so please go ahead and apply it in its entirety
>
> No problem. With my new powers I had committed it already.
>
> > As for disabling the rept because it is so memory expensive: I think that we
> > used to.have an environment variable called something like RUN_EXPENSIVE_TESTS
> > that had to be set before certain tests were run.  Checking the sources though
> > I cannot find it, so maybe I am imagining things.  I still might be a good idea
> > though.  If we use it consistently in the binutils testsuites for the big tests
> > then users will probably appreciate the facility.
>
> But a test which is run by almost nobody is more likely to break. Also I
> think "expensive" has multiple dimensions (memory and time at least), and
> depending on the system one may want to run (or suppress) one but not the
> other kind. For the test in question, it is both memory and cycles hungry,
> so there the distinction may not matter.
>
> But I'd like to raise the question again: Is what the test was added for
> actually a useful thing to test, at the risk of the test failing simply
> because there's too little memory available? Iirc the problem was non-
> graceful error handling. But the test does not check that the error in
> question now is handled gracefully; it expects that there be no error.
>
>

gas/testsuite/gas/i386/rept.s failed to assemble before the fix:

commit 39a45edc073226e748566b497c216830cec119c4
Author: Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com>
Date:   Thu Jun 7 12:47:23 2012 +0000

            PR gas/14201

We can limit it to 64-bit only if it helps.

-- 
H.J.