multi-arch testing plan

[enh]

is there a plan for improving testing? especially for multiple
architectures and multiple personalities?

one thing i was thinking of was a single "syscall" binary that parses
its arguments and makes a syscall. so you can say something like:

  syscall SYS_epoll_ctl -1 EPOLL_CTL_DEL -1 NULL

and check the output. obvious problems: how do you translate the
constants? (or is this still useful without the constants? note that
you can't just hardcode 2 or whatever if you want to work on all
architectures. even with just the architectures we support, mips has a
lot of differences.) how do you test non-failure cases where you need
to supply real arguments? it's easy to imagine passing string
arguments, but how would you do structs?

still, it would be interesting to think about the tests we could write
with this and whether even if they only solve a tiny part of the test
problem they'd still be useful.

does anyone have any better ideas? Android's about to go from 3
architectures to having to deal with 9 possibilities (3 32-bit, 3
64-bit, and 3 64-bit 32-bit personalities), so it's hard enough just
making sure i've built all the variants :-)

 --elliott