Re: MDI: testsuite support

["Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro at mips dot com>]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:

> Let's hold off on this patch until the rest of the MDI target is
> posted, please.  I appreciate your separating it into more manageable
> pieces but at the same time they are hard to consider in isolation
> and I want to be sure the whole thing goes in.

 Well, I had promised to send the testsuite bits shortly, so I did it. :-)

 Which "rest of the MDI target" are you specifically referring to?  The 
only piece I have got left is support for some obscure "set mdi" and "show 
mdi" commands that should not be subcommands of "set" and "show" in the 
first place as they operate on the target (which is against the principle 
of the commands) and the latter also breaks "show" as used to print all 
the settings.

 However if you'd like to see this bit on the list as-is, then I am fine 
with that, but I do not consider it ready for submission.  My current 
feeling is they should be reimplemented as separate commands -- while the 
affected "show mdi" commands might fit a command like "info mdi", there is 
apparently no corresponding command for "set mdi", so I suppose a pair of 
commands like "mdi set" and "mdi show" might sound better.

 Note I mean these commands are really obscure and are used things like to 
peek or poke at TLB entries and cache lines "through a back door", so I 
gather whoever is skilled enough to dare would know what they are doing 
and get used to whatever the commands are called.  In fact hardly anybody 
uses them as proved by an embarrasing bug I fixed a while ago somewhere in 
this area. ;-)  They are occasionally useful for stuff like debugging 
system bringup issues, weird cache corruption problems and suchlike.

  Maciej