On 26 April 2012 02:39, Michael Hope michael.hope@linaro.org wrote:
We use QEMU to test programs built by the toolchain binary release for correctness.
Is that really such a great idea? Qemu is generally less strict than actual hardware with things like alignment restrictions. This is fine for running software on a foreign architecture, which is the typical use case for emulators, and it is much faster than implementing strict checks for things no correct program should ever do.
A few years ago, Codesourcery released an ARM compiler, binaries from which immediately crashed on real hardware. They had only tested the output in Qemu, never on hardware. Since then, many bugs in Qemu have been fixed, but I would still not trust it for validating a compiler.