Hi Phil,
For a while I have been wondering about volunteering an ARM Linux machine to run tests; please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the current testing is done on x86 and one POWER system.
AFAIK, that's correct, and it is certainly correct for the reliable testers. Out of curiosity, does your Linux on ARM system run big endian or little endian? I would personally love to have at least one regular Linux tester running big endian, but that's no big thing.
I have a box with a dual-core Cortex-A15 (Samsung Exynos 5) and 2GB of RAM running Debian that is mostly idle. It currently has g++ 4.6 installed. But could it successfully run the tests in a sane period of time without choking? Has anyone observed what the peak RAM requirement is? What is the typical run time on an x86 system?
My desktop system under Win7, w/16GB ram, Intel i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s) a full run takes roughly 6 hours or so the first time, but that drops on subsequent runs. If nothing much has changed, it can be as low as 2 hours. If it helps, we could set up a light test mode that only tested core libraries, where core is defined as those a lot of other libraries depend on. That would eliminate a lot of tests, including a lot that take a long time to compile or run. I don't know what memory use is, but have run on a Linux virtual machine with 2 gigs in the past.
I do have longer term plans for this hardware so it might not be available permanently - or it might melt - but I would be willing to give it a try.
Are there more up-to-date instructions than those at http://beta.boost.org/development/running_regression_tests.html ? I have very limited experience with Boost.Build, Boost.Test, git or Python so I anticipate needing some hand-holding!
Those are the latest. Note that I updated them as recently as this morning. Good to hear from you, --Beman