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Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 08:24:33 -0500
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Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/19] Add New softfloat Routines for VSX
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To: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>, =?UTF-8?B?QWxleCBCZW5uw6ll?= <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
Cc: "qemu-ppc@nongnu.org" <qemu-ppc@nongnu.org>, QEMU Developers <qemu-devel@nongnu.org>

On 10/25/2013 6:44 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 25 October 2013 12:34, Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> wrote:
>> Is it worth adding some sort of test into make check to defend these
>> softfloat functions against unintentional breakage? It would certainly
>> be worthwhile as soon as multiple arches use these functions as float
>> errors are often subtle and hard to track down.
>
> Ideally, but there's zero infrastructure for doing the kind
> of serious including-edge-cases testing at the moment, so I'm
> not really in favour of making it a gating condition for
> accepting patches.
>
> If somebody wanted to set up such infrastructure, there are
> a couple of approaches that spring to mind:
>   (a) get risu (https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/Risu) working
>    on more target architectures, add the "record-and-replay" feature
>    so it can be run without having target hardware, and then just
>    test softfloat by testing the actual target fp instructions
>   (b) something involving wiring up IBM's IEEE test suite
>    vectors directly to our softfloat code:
>   https://www.research.ibm.com/cgi-bin/haifa/test_suite_download.pl?first=elenag&second=webmaster
>    (it's not clear to me what license the test vectors are
>    under)

Softfloat would seem to lend itself very well to unit testing which makes (b)
attractive.  Let me see if I can get an answer to the licensing question.