This week I found an error in LLVM that can only be reproduced on ARM hardware, if the GCC that compiles it specifies --mcpu=cortex-a15. The error is a segfault on one of the tests compiled by that Clang/LLVM. As you can see, it's not something trivial that we'd expect people to do easily.

My question is: How do we tackle this type of bug?

One option is to do all the debugging and interface with the original patch author until we fix the problem. This works well for simple bugs, but in this case I'm not sure it will work.

Another option was to have a board on Linaro's DMZ with no access to anything else internally, so that people could log in and debug the problem in situ.

This board would have to be setup just for the debugging with a random password given only to the author of the patch and cleaned up right after the bug is fixed (to avoid external abuse).

We could use the same board for LLVM, GCC, GDB, etc. but it should be easy to re-flash it to a minimum system, so that we don't spend too much time setting it up.

Does anyone have a better idea?

cheers,

--renato