On Tue, Mar 25, 2025 at 07:00:34PM -0500, Peter Bergner wrote: > On 3/25/25 5:17 PM, Segher Boessenkool wrote: > > On Tue, Mar 25, 2025 at 03:33:59PM -0500, Peter Bergner wrote: > >> Segher, any reason you can give on why we shouldn't go the easy route to > >> "fix" (yes, these are air-quotes) this by using -fno-ipa-icf? > > > > One reason is that that option should not make any difference whatsoever > > for a well-written testcase: a testcases that wants to test what insns > > are generated for particular code, damn well should be written in such a > > way that it is very unlikely the compiler will ever generate different > > code for it. Another reason is I had to look up what that option with > > the cryptical name does, what that names stands for. And finally, will > > we be doing more maintenance on this later? Testcase maintenance is > > wasted work, work that does not scale even, so it is important to write > > testcases so that maintenance isn't needed, and if it becomes necessary > > anyway to improve it so that it will not be needed so much in the > > future. > > I know there are reasons for wanting it split up, but do we really want > to spend the development time splitting this old power7 test case up rather > than just adding the -fno-ipa-icf option?
Like I said: > It is probably less work the next time one of those tests starts failing > to *start* with splitting the test up :-) > You also didn't explicitly say > which solution we should go with, so we're in a little limbo here. I didn't finish my reply to Jeevitha's patch yet, so you didn't see anything of that yet, correct. Reason 4 (is it four? Some bigger number anyway) to not want to use command line options like this in tests: it will be copied unthinkingly to other tests and maybe to production code even. Cargo-cult programming is a thing. At the very least always add a comment saying why some unusual option is used! Segher
