Re: new DejaGnu team member

[James Dein]

On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 9:50 PM, Dan Kegel wrote:

> Ben Elliston wrote:
> > Dan Kegel <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > > While we're on the subject of Dejagnu improvements, anyone
> > > interested in souping it up to be able to take advantage of multiple
> > > identical target systems so the tests can be run in parallel?
> >
> > I am.
> >
> > Done properly, a nice side effect of running tests on multiple targets
> > is that native testing or testing on simulators can take advantage of
> > multiprocessor systems.
> >
> > Would you care to sketch out a plan?
>
> The idea is to execute dg-style tests (where dg is a simple
> high-level driver used by many of the gcc tests) in parallel,
> and leave other styles of test alone.  (I think gcc is moving
> more of the tests towards dg in order to make it easier to support
> that other regression testing framework.)
>
> This lets you easily pipeline compilation and execution,
> since dg-style tests do nothing but run simple standalone programs
> in batch mode on the target.
> - Dan

It's not quite so simple as that, because when programs are downloaded 
to target boards, the harness has to wait for them to finish so that it 
can glean the exit status, which sometimes means grepping the status 
info from the program's output.  For native testing, and for simulators 
where you can take advantage of the system's handling of concurrency 
(i.e., fork/exec/wait), it's not such a big deal.

I should probably mention at this point that I am currently working on 
enhancements to `dg' to handle multiple source files per test.  We will 
be writing tests for this new feature and testing them -- and the DG 
enhancements -- regularly, on native.  I will, of course, perform some 
non-native runs of the tests to make sure I haven't broken the `remote' 
system.  Anyway, let's make sure our improvements dovetail rather than 
clash.  The main trick (with my work) is to make sure the source files 
get downloaded to the "remote host" before the compiler gets invoked.  
Executing executables does not become harder (or easier :-).  Handling 
dg-warning and friends requires sorting messages by source file.  
There's no rocket science involved, I think.

As for Python... I would rather use Elmo my new scripting language; 
Elmo is my answer to Tcl :-).

Jim Dein

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