llvm/docs/TestSuiteMakefileGuide.html

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<h1>
  LLVM test-suite Makefile Guide
</h1>

<ol>
  <li><a href="#overview">Overview</a></li>
  <li><a href="#testsuitestructure">Test suite structure</a></li>
  <li><a href="#testsuiterun">Running the test suite</a>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="#testsuiteexternal">Configuring External Tests</a></li>
      <li><a href="#testsuitetests">Running different tests</a></li>
      <li><a href="#testsuiteoutput">Generating test output</a></li>
      <li><a href="#testsuitecustom">Writing custom tests for test-suite</a></li>
   </ul>
  </li>
</ol>

<div class="doc_author">
  <p>Written by John T. Criswell, Daniel Dunbar, Reid Spencer, and Tanya Lattner</p>
</div>

<!--=========================================================================-->
<h2><a name="overview">Overview</a></h2>
<!--=========================================================================-->

<div>

<p>This document describes the features of the Makefile-based LLVM
test-suite. This way of interacting with the test-suite is deprecated in favor
of running the test-suite using LNT, but may continue to prove useful for some
users. See the Testing
Guide's <a href="TestingGuide.html#testsuitequickstart">test-suite
Quickstart</a> section for more information.</p>

</div>

<!--=========================================================================-->
<h2><a name="testsuitestructure">Test suite Structure</a></h2>
<!--=========================================================================-->

<div>

<p>The <tt>test-suite</tt> module contains a number of programs that can be compiled
with LLVM and executed. These programs are compiled using the native compiler
and various LLVM backends. The output from the program compiled with the
native compiler is assumed correct; the results from the other programs are
compared to the native program output and pass if they match.</p>

<p>When executing tests, it is usually a good idea to start out with a subset of
the available tests or programs. This makes test run times smaller at first and
later on this is useful to investigate individual test failures. To run some
test only on a subset of programs, simply change directory to the programs you
want tested and run <tt>gmake</tt> there. Alternatively, you can run a different
test using the <tt>TEST</tt> variable to change what tests or run on the
selected programs (see below for more info).</p>

<p>In addition for testing correctness, the <tt>test-suite</tt> directory also
performs timing tests of various LLVM optimizations.  It also records
compilation times for the compilers and the JIT.  This information can be
used to compare the effectiveness of LLVM's optimizations and code
generation.</p>

<p><tt>test-suite</tt> tests are divided into three types of tests: MultiSource,
SingleSource, and External.</p>

<ul>
<li><tt>test-suite/SingleSource</tt>
<p>The SingleSource directory contains test programs that are only a single
source file in size.  These are usually small benchmark programs or small
programs that calculate a particular value.  Several such programs are grouped
together in each directory.</p></li>

<li><tt>test-suite/MultiSource</tt>
<p>The MultiSource directory contains subdirectories which contain entire
programs with multiple source files.  Large benchmarks and whole applications
go here.</p></li>

<li><tt>test-suite/External</tt>
<p>The External directory contains Makefiles for building code that is external
to (i.e., not distributed with) LLVM.  The most prominent members of this
directory are the SPEC 95 and SPEC 2000 benchmark suites. The <tt>External</tt>
directory does not contain these actual tests, but only the Makefiles that know
how to properly compile these programs from somewhere else. The presence and
location of these external programs is configured by the test-suite
<tt>configure</tt> script.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>Each tree is then subdivided into several categories, including applications,
benchmarks, regression tests, code that is strange grammatically, etc.  These
organizations should be relatively self explanatory.</p>

<p>Some tests are known to fail.  Some are bugs that we have not fixed yet;
others are features that we haven't added yet (or may never add).  In the
regression tests, the result for such tests will be XFAIL (eXpected FAILure).
In this way, you can tell the difference between an expected and unexpected
failure.</p>

<p>The tests in the test suite have no such feature at this time. If the
test passes, only warnings and other miscellaneous output will be generated.  If
a test fails, a large &lt;program&gt; FAILED message will be displayed.  This
will help you separate benign warnings from actual test failures.</p>

</div>

<!--=========================================================================-->
<h2><a name="testsuiterun">Running the test suite</a></h2>
<!--=========================================================================-->

<div>

<p>First, all tests are executed within the LLVM object directory tree.  They
<i>are not</i> executed inside of the LLVM source tree. This is because the
test suite creates temporary files during execution.</p>

<p>To run the test suite, you need to use the following steps:</p>

<ol>
  <li><tt>cd</tt> into the <tt>llvm/projects</tt> directory in your source tree.
  </li>

  <li><p>Check out the <tt>test-suite</tt> module with:</p>

<div class="doc_code">
<pre>
% svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/test-suite/trunk test-suite
</pre>
</div>
    <p>This will get the test suite into <tt>llvm/projects/test-suite</tt>.</p>
  </li>
  <li><p>Configure and build <tt>llvm</tt>.</p></li>
  <li><p>Configure and build <tt>llvm-gcc</tt>.</p></li>
  <li><p>Install <tt>llvm-gcc</tt> somewhere.</p></li>
  <li><p><em>Re-configure</em> <tt>llvm</tt> from the top level of
      each build tree (LLVM object directory tree) in which you want
      to run the test suite, just as you do before building LLVM.</p>
    <p>During the <em>re-configuration</em>, you must either: (1)
      have <tt>llvm-gcc</tt> you just built in your path, or (2)
      specify the directory where your just-built <tt>llvm-gcc</tt> is
      installed using <tt>--with-llvmgccdir=$LLVM_GCC_DIR</tt>.</p>
    <p>You must also tell the configure machinery that the test suite
      is available so it can be configured for your build tree:</p>
<div class="doc_code">
<pre>
% cd $LLVM_OBJ_ROOT ; $LLVM_SRC_ROOT/configure [--with-llvmgccdir=$LLVM_GCC_DIR]
</pre>
</div>
    <p>[Remember that <tt>$LLVM_GCC_DIR</tt> is the directory where you
    <em>installed</em> llvm-gcc, not its src or obj directory.]</p>
  </li>

  <li><p>You can now run the test suite from your build tree as follows:</p>
<div class="doc_code">
<pre>
% cd $LLVM_OBJ_ROOT/projects/test-suite
% make
</pre>
</div>
  </li>
</ol>
<p>Note that the second and third steps only need to be done once. After you
have the suite checked out and configured, you don't need to do it again (unless
the test code or configure script changes).</p>

<!-- _______________________________________________________________________ -->
<h3>
  <a name="testsuiteexternal">Configuring External Tests</a>
</h3>
<!-- _______________________________________________________________________ -->

<div>
<p>In order to run the External tests in the <tt>test-suite</tt>
  module, you must specify <i>--with-externals</i>.  This
  must be done during the <em>re-configuration</em> step (see above),
  and the <tt>llvm</tt> re-configuration must recognize the
  previously-built <tt>llvm-gcc</tt>.  If any of these is missing or
  neglected, the External tests won't work.</p>
<dl>
<dt><i>--with-externals</i></dt>
<dt><i>--with-externals=&lt;<tt>directory</tt>&gt;</i></dt>
</dl>
  This tells LLVM where to find any external tests.  They are expected to be
  in specifically named subdirectories of &lt;<tt>directory</tt>&gt;.
  If <tt>directory</tt> is left unspecified,
  <tt>configure</tt> uses the default value
  <tt>/home/vadve/shared/benchmarks/speccpu2000/benchspec</tt>.
  Subdirectory names known to LLVM include:
  <dl>
  <dt>spec95</dt>
  <dt>speccpu2000</dt>
  <dt>speccpu2006</dt>
  <dt>povray31</dt>
  </dl>
  Others are added from time to time, and can be determined from
  <tt>configure</tt>.
</div>

<!-- _______________________________________________________________________ -->
<h3>
  <a name="testsuitetests">Running different tests</a>
</h3>
<!-- _______________________________________________________________________ -->
<div>
<p>In addition to the regular "whole program" tests, the <tt>test-suite</tt>
module also provides a mechanism for compiling the programs in different ways.
If the variable TEST is defined on the <tt>gmake</tt> command line, the test system will
include a Makefile named <tt>TEST.&lt;value of TEST variable&gt;.Makefile</tt>.
This Makefile can modify build rules to yield different results.</p>

<p>For example, the LLVM nightly tester uses <tt>TEST.nightly.Makefile</tt> to
create the nightly test reports.  To run the nightly tests, run <tt>gmake
TEST=nightly</tt>.</p>

<p>There are several TEST Makefiles available in the tree.  Some of them are
designed for internal LLVM research and will not work outside of the LLVM
research group.  They may still be valuable, however, as a guide to writing your
own TEST Makefile for any optimization or analysis passes that you develop with
LLVM.</p>

</div>

<!-- _______________________________________________________________________ -->
<h3>
  <a name="testsuiteoutput">Generating test output</a>
</h3>
<!-- _______________________________________________________________________ -->
<div>
  <p>There are a number of ways to run the tests and generate output. The most
  simple one is simply running <tt>gmake</tt> with no arguments. This will
  compile and run all programs in the tree using a number of different methods
  and compare results. Any failures are reported in the output, but are likely
  drowned in the other output. Passes are not reported explicitely.</p>

  <p>Somewhat better is running <tt>gmake TEST=sometest test</tt>, which runs
  the specified test and usually adds per-program summaries to the output
  (depending on which sometest you use). For example, the <tt>nightly</tt> test
  explicitely outputs TEST-PASS or TEST-FAIL for every test after each program.
  Though these lines are still drowned in the output, it's easy to grep the
  output logs in the Output directories.</p>

  <p>Even better are the <tt>report</tt> and <tt>report.format</tt> targets
  (where <tt>format</tt> is one of <tt>html</tt>, <tt>csv</tt>, <tt>text</tt> or
  <tt>graphs</tt>). The exact contents of the report are dependent on which
  <tt>TEST</tt> you are running, but the text results are always shown at the
  end of the run and the results are always stored in the
  <tt>report.&lt;type&gt;.format</tt> file (when running with
  <tt>TEST=&lt;type&gt;</tt>).

  The <tt>report</tt> also generate a file called
  <tt>report.&lt;type&gt;.raw.out</tt> containing the output of the entire test
  run.
</div>

<!-- _______________________________________________________________________ -->
<h3>
  <a name="testsuitecustom">Writing custom tests for the test suite</a>
</h3>
<!-- _______________________________________________________________________ -->

<div>

<p>Assuming you can run the test suite, (e.g. "<tt>gmake TEST=nightly report</tt>"
should work), it is really easy to run optimizations or code generator
components against every program in the tree, collecting statistics or running
custom checks for correctness.  At base, this is how the nightly tester works,
it's just one example of a general framework.</p>

<p>Lets say that you have an LLVM optimization pass, and you want to see how
many times it triggers.  First thing you should do is add an LLVM
<a href="ProgrammersManual.html#Statistic">statistic</a> to your pass, which
will tally counts of things you care about.</p>

<p>Following this, you can set up a test and a report that collects these and
formats them for easy viewing.  This consists of two files, a
"<tt>test-suite/TEST.XXX.Makefile</tt>" fragment (where XXX is the name of your
test) and a "<tt>test-suite/TEST.XXX.report</tt>" file that indicates how to
format the output into a table.  There are many example reports of various
levels of sophistication included with the test suite, and the framework is very
general.</p>

<p>If you are interested in testing an optimization pass, check out the
"libcalls" test as an example.  It can be run like this:<p>

<div class="doc_code">
<pre>
% cd llvm/projects/test-suite/MultiSource/Benchmarks  # or some other level
% make TEST=libcalls report
</pre>
</div>

<p>This will do a bunch of stuff, then eventually print a table like this:</p>

<div class="doc_code">
<pre>
Name                                  | total | #exit |
...
FreeBench/analyzer/analyzer           | 51    | 6     |
FreeBench/fourinarow/fourinarow       | 1     | 1     |
FreeBench/neural/neural               | 19    | 9     |
FreeBench/pifft/pifft                 | 5     | 3     |
MallocBench/cfrac/cfrac               | 1     | *     |
MallocBench/espresso/espresso         | 52    | 12    |
MallocBench/gs/gs                     | 4     | *     |
Prolangs-C/TimberWolfMC/timberwolfmc  | 302   | *     |
Prolangs-C/agrep/agrep                | 33    | 12    |
Prolangs-C/allroots/allroots          | *     | *     |
Prolangs-C/assembler/assembler        | 47    | *     |
Prolangs-C/bison/mybison              | 74    | *     |
...
</pre>
</div>

<p>This basically is grepping the -stats output and displaying it in a table.
You can also use the "TEST=libcalls report.html" target to get the table in HTML
form, similarly for report.csv and report.tex.</p>

<p>The source for this is in test-suite/TEST.libcalls.*.  The format is pretty
simple: the Makefile indicates how to run the test (in this case,
"<tt>opt -simplify-libcalls -stats</tt>"), and the report contains one line for
each column of the output.  The first value is the header for the column and the
second is the regex to grep the output of the command for.  There are lots of
example reports that can do fancy stuff.</p>

</div>

</div>

<!-- *********************************************************************** -->

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