This document contains information about testing the release candidates that will ultimately be the next LLVM release. For more information on how to manage the actual release, please refer to How To Release LLVM To The Public.
Once the release process starts, the Release Manager will ask for volunteers, and it’ll be the role of each volunteer to:
Not all bugs or regressions are show-stoppers and it’s a bit of a grey area what should be fixed before the next candidate and what can wait until the next release.
It’ll depend on:
The scripts are in the utils/release directory.
This script will check-out, configure and compile LLVM+Clang (+ most add-ons, like compiler-rt, libcxx, libomp and clang-extra-tools) in three stages, and will test the final stage. It’ll have installed the final binaries on the Phase3/Releasei(+Asserts) directory, and that’s the one you should use for the test-suite and other external tests.
To run the script on a specific release candidate run:
./test-release.sh \
-release 3.3 \
-rc 1 \
-no-64bit \
-test-asserts \
-no-compare-files
Each system will require different options. For instance, x86_64 will obviously not need -no-64bit while 32-bit systems will, or the script will fail.
The important flags to get right are:
This script builds three phases of Clang+LLVM twice each (Release and Release+Asserts), so use screen or nohup to avoid headaches, since it’ll take a long time.
Use the --help option to see all the options and chose it according to your needs.
TODO
Follow the LNT Quick Start Guide link on how to set-up the test-suite
The binary location you’ll have to use for testing is inside the rcN/Phase3/Release+Asserts/llvmCore-REL-RC.install. Link that directory to an easier location and run the test-suite.
An example on the run command line, assuming you created a link from the correct install directory to ~/devel/llvm/install:
./sandbox/bin/python sandbox/bin/lnt runtest \
nt \
-j4 \
--sandbox sandbox \
--test-suite ~/devel/llvm/test/test-suite \
--cc ~/devel/llvm/install/bin/clang \
--cxx ~/devel/llvm/install/bin/clang++
It should have no new regressions, compared to the previous release or release candidate. You don’t need to fix all the bugs in the test-suite, since they’re not necessarily meant to pass on all architectures all the time. This is due to the nature of the result checking, which relies on direct comparison, and most of the time, the failures are related to bad output checking, rather than bad code generation.
If the errors are in LLVM itself, please report every single regression found as blocker, and all the other bugs as important, but not necessarily blocking the release to proceed. They can be set as “known failures” and to be fix on a future date.
When the release process is announced on the mailing list, you should prepare for the testing, by applying the same testing you’ll do on the release candidates, on the previous release.
You should:
If the final phase’s make check-all failed, it’s a good idea to also test the intermediate stages by going on the obj directory and running make check-all to find if there’s at least one stage that passes (helps when reducing the error for bug report purposes).
When the Release Manager sends you the release candidate, download all sources, unzip on the same directory (there will be sym-links from the appropriate places to them), and run the release test as above.
You should:
Once the release manages announces that the latest candidate is the good one, you have to pack the Release (no Asserts) install directory on Phase3 and that will be the official binary.
If you found regressions or failures when comparing a release candidate with the previous release, follow the rules below: