Re: [RFA/testsuite] Some feedback about bigcore.exp...

[mec.gnu@mindspring.com (Michael Elizabeth Chastain)]

My thoughts ...

It's really more of a per-site thing, which to me means an environment
variable.  I know the dejagnu way would be to set a variable in site.exp
but I really prefer to work with environment variables.

The default is to run the test in order to flush out more bugs on more
architectures but perhaps we could have an easy way to suppress this
test and then document that way.  It's tough to run a regression test
suite when one of the 300 test scripts bangs so many operating systems
so hard.

The core file should not fill up the disk as long as the operating
system and the file system dump core files as sparse files.
(Cheat sheet: think of a file as an array of blocks.  For a "sparse
file", the file system does not store blocks which are all 0's.
All the system calls like read(2) and write(2) work normally but there
are less blocks needed on the disk than the size of the file.)

I'm running red hat linux 8 with kernel 2.4.8-14 on an ext3 file system
and my core files are sparse.  What kernel/file-system do you have
where the core files actually take up that much space?

I wish there were a portable way to compress sparse files quickly and
easily.  I'm using "tar cSf ..." to manage these files followed by bzip2
but that is gnu-specific.

Michael C