aarch32 testing in Fedora

[Alex Kashchenko]

Hi,

Just for your information about the aarch32 testing, as a part of a 
preparation to the planned aarch32-java package in Fedora [1]. ARM-32 is 
one of the primary architectures in Fedora (named armv7hl).

We currently use the following ARM boards for building and testing 
(trying to cover different ARM CPUs):

1) BeagleBone Black: Cortex-A8 TI Sitara AM335X	
2) Cubietruck: Cortex-A7 Allwinner sun7i A20
3) Raspberry Pi 2: Cortex-A7 BCM2836/2709
4) Raspberry Pi 3: Cortex-A53 BCM2837/2709 (armv8 running in aarch32 state)

The following process is used for testing changes:

1) build jdk8u RPM package in Fedora 24 running on ARM builder in Fedora 
infrastructure [2]
2) build the same RPM package in Fedora 24 on all the boards listed above
3) run VM-related subset of the JCK8 on the clean Fedora 24 on all the 
boards listed above and additionally in QEMU ARM-32 VM
4) build jdk9 cross-compiling it in Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64
5) build jdk9 natively in Ubuntu 16.04 on on all the boards listed above

Some more details:
  - jdk8u RPM package is built natively in release mode using 
"bootcycle-images" target (so patched jdk is used to bootstrap itself).
  - jdk9 is built in slowdebug mode without bootstrapping
  - all the patches posted to aarch32-port-dev list are usually tested 
in 2-3 days (currently finishing nativeInstrRe.patch)
  - Docker containers are used to run F24 and U16.04 userspaces on all 
the boards and in QEMU

I would appreciate any comments/advices how to make this process more 
adequate to the template interpreter and C1-related changes, especially 
about the set of tests to run to cover such changes better.


[1] 
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/aarch32-port-dev/2016-March/000154.html
[2] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/

-- 
-Alex