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by littlehood 2991 days ago
We are able to create tests with emulated hardware from specification, but writing emulation taking into account quirks, edge cases and speculative behaviour would be great amount of work, even for simplest devices.

I'd recommend reading Dolphin emulator release notes for a reference how much work is required to properly emulate hardware such that actual software may run without glitches and errors even for (AFAIK) 3 hardware sets.
1 comments
rbanffy 2991 days ago
> writing emulation taking into account quirks

I believe quirks would be added as they are uncovered. It'd also become a form of documentation. Emulation doesn't need to be precise to be valuable - if we can test it against an emulator on a commodity machine before testing it on metal on a somewhat busy machine, it's still a win - we don't need to waste time on a real multimillion zSeries or Cray if it crashes the emulator.

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littlehood 2990 days ago
That way we would be able to create integration test coverage of 100% while still being able to panic on real hardware, until all messy behaviour is implemented. It's like writing unit-test kind of integration tests which then fail when provisioned :)
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rbanffy 2988 days ago
Passing tests and then failing when provisioned is still better than just failing when provisioned. At least you know that it should work (and maybe does, on different variations of the hardware).
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