Distributing 'make check' across a cluster

[Diego Novillo]

Ben, we briefly chatted about this earlier.  Here's more details.

I'm trying to distribute GCC testing across nodes in a cluster that do 
not share a common file system.  The strategy is (roughly) to avoid 
using the build tree and distribute:

1- The installed tree out of 'make install'.

2- All the files in <src>/testsuite/lib/

3- All the files in <src>/testsuite/config/

4- A complete testsuite directory (say gcc/testsuite/g++.dg/tree-ssa) 
together with its closest .exp driver file (in this case ../dg.exp).

5- On the machine receiving that directory, create a site.exp defining 
things like srcdir, tmpdir, G*_UNDER_TEST and execute 'runtest'.

This is working pretty well for everything outside of libstdc++.  I can 
reduce testing from about an hour to a few minutes (we test -m32 and -m64).

libstdc++ seems to be doing a few other manipulations of site.exp and 
additional setup that's defeating my scripts.  Any pointers to where I 
should be looking?

If I can get this to work, it would be entirely possible to set it up on 
the FSF farm (provided the distribution overhead is tolerable).


Thanks.  Diego.