Re: Problem with LD-to-LE relaxation in gnu2 tls-dialect (IA32 and X86-64)

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On Jul 15, 2008, "H.J. Lu" <hjl.tools@gmail.com> wrote:

> The only changes are the expected outputs. The only thing I
> know is they match the linker's outputs :-).

They did that before.  All other cases had been tested with run-time
tests before.  Unfortunately, I'd missed this one case of relaxation,
both in the specs and in the tests.  See perf-src in
http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/writeups/TLS/ if you want to know
what was actually run-time tested, in addition to the coverage
afforded by the glibc testsuite.

Back then, it didn't seem like such a good idea to add linker tests
that depend on GCC and glibc features that are not widely deployed.
The features hadn't even been added to GCC or glibc back then, and
glibc has gained support for these extensions just a couple of months
ago.

Even now, I don't think this is the place for integration testing.
Especially when it's completely redundant with existing tests.

This linker test tests the linker behavior.  Testing for availability
of specific compiler and libc features seems like overkill (if at all
doable; how do you tell a linker error from lack of support in libc?),
and a complete waste of time.

> Those are native run-time linker tests.

Thanks for the pointers.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ÂSÃ Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}