gprofng testing

[Vladimir Mezentsev]

Hi Nick,
thank you for the answer.
My comments are below.

On 5/10/23 04:20, Nick Clifton wrote:
> Hi Vladimir,
>
>> I want to add more tests for gprofng.
>
> That would be most appreciated.
>
>> These tests use pre-existing experiments and binaries.
>> Each test has a golden file which we compare against the new gprofng 
>> output.
>>
>> We never rebuilt the experiments and binaries. But sometimes we 
>> changed the golden file.
>> The size of experiments can be big.
>> The size of gold files is usually small.
>>
>> How to make such tests public?
>
> 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.


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

>
> My best suggestion would be to create lots of small tests rather than
> several large tests.  If that is possible.
>
>> PS.
>> I see that the old gprof doesn't have tests inside binutils-gdb.git. 
>> How do we test gprof?
>
> We don't. :-(

I see that gdb/testsuite is small.
Is there a big public test suite for gdb (or any other binutils/gcc 
components) ?

Thank you,
-Vladimir


> Gprof is very old and was added to the binutils long ago.  Long before
> testsuites were invented.  OK, so that is not quite true, testsuites
> have been around for as along as code has been around, but the gprof
> sources were added to the binutils without a testsuite and noone has
> seen fit to create one since.  Of course if you are volunteering, I
> will not say "no"...
>
> Cheers
>   Nick
>
>