Continued looking at SPEC 2006.
The two ICEs I mentioned last week are gone on the Natty version of the compiler, however the 4 programs that run and give the wrong
results still happen with the Natty version and the latest version from bzr.
   The 4 failures are:
      h264ref - still fails on bzr 99447 with -O2 or -O0
      sphinx3 - still fails on bzr 99447 with -O2 or -O0
      gromacs - still fails on bzr 99447 with -O2 but works with -O1; I've followed this through and detailed it in bug 693502; it looks to me like
                     a post-increment gone wrong (it's split so it's not actually a post increment and the original rather than post inc'd value gets used)
      zeusmp - this fails to load the binary; it's got a >1GB bss section. Interestingly it gets further on my beagle with less memory but a bit of swap,
                    even though I think it's not really using all of the BSS in the config I'm using.

   I'm hoping to leave a 'ref' run going over the new year.

The canis1 Orion board I was also running Spec on last weekend died during the run and hasn't come back.

perf
We now have silverberry using the -proposed kernel which has the fixed PERF_EVENT config, and perf seems to work fine.

libffi
I've started building the page https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/FFIusers listing things that use FFI; (generated by a bit of apt wrangling).
There are basically 3 sets:
     a) Apps that just use ffi for something specific
     b) Languages that then let the users of those languages have varying degrees of freedom in themselves
     c) Haskell - While some of the packages are actually probably ffi users, I think a lot of these are false dependencies; almost every haskell user seems
to gain a dependency on libffi directly.

I'm back on the 4th January.

Dave