[cairo] Automated testing of Cairo

[Bryce Harrington]

Heya all,

I'm happy to be able to announce that OSDL will be supporting Cairo by
providing automated testing on various platforms.

Carl and I talked about this at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon a few
months back.  Cairo is an important piece of the Linux desktop these
days, as its used everywhere from GNOME to Mozilla and more; it
certainly fits in with OSDL's mission to work with the open source
community to help make Desktop Linux succeed in the enterprise.

Also, since Cairo is a library and already has a good set of tests, it's
proven easy to run in Crucible, an automated test environment we use for
testing NFSv4 and some other Linux things.  (I also use Crucible at home
for Inkscape testing.)

 * Right now, once a day git snapshots are pulled and 'make check' run.
   Currently, they're being run on three x86 systems:
    - Gentoo P4 x86/32
    - Redhat P4 x86/32
    - Gentoo Xeon x86/64 (but in 32-bit mode)

 * Cairo results can be found here:
    http://crucible.osdl.org/runs/cairo_branches.html

 * More tests can (and should) be added.  Point me at what you'd like to
   have run.

 * We also have an amd64 and an itanium2, and we can run the Xeon in
   64-bit mode, if you wish to do 64-bit testing.

 * Developer login access to the SUTs is available on request.
   I can provide full access + instruction for test developers.

 * If you have hardware worth adding to the pool for testing Cairo
   against, we can host it in our test environment here in Beaverton, OR
   (near Carl and Keith).  We would just need someone identified as the
   admin for it (esp. if it's a non-Linux box).

 * Crucible gives a lot of flexibility for changing Linux kernels, so if
   there's any kernel-variation worth doing, we're well set up for
   automating that.


With Carl's announcement yesterday that the Cairo team is turning
attention to performance improvement work, this seems like a great time
to jump in.  I've been doing a lot of NFS performance work, so am hoping
some of our analysis tools (e.g. historical performance graphing) may be
reusable for Cairo without too much trouble.  Also, it sounds like Carl
is working on performance tests.  Does anyone else have performance (or
other) tests that could be used, that you'd be able to show me how to
run?

Bryce