Re: Revised release criteria for GCC 4.0

["E. Weddington" <ericw at evcohs dot com>]

Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
>  
>
> > We also have a GDB simulator for the AVR, but I'm afraid nobody ever
> > tried running the Dejagnu testsuite with it.
> >    
>
> I don't see an avr simulator in src/sim.  
That is correct. The "simulator" that Bernardo was probably referring to 
is a seperate program: SimulAVR
<http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/simulavr/>

If I have my terminology correct, simulavr can act as a gdbserver, 
providing a backend to GDB to provide simulation for the AVR.

> The presence of a turn-key simulator as per simtest-howto.html
> makes it *immensely* more simple for others than hardware
> holders to regression-test their GCC changes, verify bugs and
> fix them.  So all the shouting from AVR enthusiasts is suggested
> be better spent getting an AVR simulator and a newlib port in
> the tree.
>
>
>  

There have been some recent, intense interest in doing something along 
these lines for the AVR. For example, there has been recent work to get 
an AVR testsuite running for binutils. I understand that SimulAVR above 
is very probably inadequate to run the GCC testsuite in it's current form.

Can you answer some basic questions, though?

1. Under simtest-howto.html, it mentions that newlib is required for 
testing, and you mention a newlib port. Why is newlib required? The avr 
port is a slightly different beast in that, for the vast majority of 
users (see more below), it does not use newlib as its C library, it uses 
avr-libc: <http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/avr-libc/>, and has done 
so for a few years. The only recent exception to this is the RTEMS folks 
who are more interested in a newlib port. I don't know offhand how 
mature the newlib avr port is.

2. You speak of an "AVR simulator". I've seen various scattered 
information about generating a simulator (for embedded targets) and 
usage. Is there some doc that explains what the entire process is on 
putting together a simulator? and where to put it? Pointers welcome. I 
understand that DejaGnu is used to perform the actual testing.

Thanks
Eric