linuxbios autobuild / regression testing

[Eric W. Biederman]

Stefan Reinauer <stepan at openbios.org> writes:

> * Eric W. Biederman <ebiederman at lnxi.com> [041104 20:21]:
> > In any case we need to start running abuild regularly.
> > We need to have a way of dealing with ports that we are totally broken
> > in the tree.
> 
> I implemented simple cross compiling support in LinuxBIOS abuild. So far 
> it supports compiling x86 images on AMD64 and possibly PPC images on
> PPC64 (untested).
> 
> If I'd find a set of cross-ppc-gcc rpms for SUSE 9.0-AMD64 I could set
> up cross building ppc binaries on openbios.org and have the results
> put to a web page or mailed regularly to the LinuxBIOS mailinglist.
> 
> It seems no mainboard says "use LD" at all yet. Some still don't 
> "use CC" but this is minor..

Actually what you should be looking for is "uses CROSS_COMPILE"
Currently we don't seem to call LD directly so as long as gcc can
find the proper one we are ok.
 
> What's the usual naming convention for the cross compiler and cross
> linker of a given platform? We also need to cope with multiple payloads
> if we want to be able to use the resulting binaries... (in an ideal
> world the next step would be to automatically flash them)

I suspect that we will want to have a simple Config.lb in targets that
we can start with and add cross compiling and other options to.
 
> Your check for a previous successful compile is really useful when
> flying over the tree and fixing a larger number of boards. To detect
> any regressions easily I added the option -a so all motherboard builds
> can be forced.
>
> also with -t vendor/board it is possible to only build a given board
> 
> ./abuild.sh -at arima/hdama
> will always rebuild the single target arima hdama

-a and -t sound like useful additions.

Just don't forget that ultimately if we can fix the dependencies in the
tree we both -a and my caching of what actually built successfully
should be trivial.

Note: I had to tweak the parser so it would work when I specified where the
linuxbios tree was.  It was putting single quotes around the pathname
nad ls was not really fond of './freebios2/'/src/mainboard ....

Eric