        Release Notes for SystemC 2.3.3 regression test suite
        =====================================================


CONTENTS
========

  1) What's new in this release?

  2) Bug fixes and enhancements

  3) Other changes

  4) Known limitations


1) What's new in this release?
==============================

Since the 2.3.0 release, TLM2 and SystemC regressions are now combined into
this single suite.

Compatibility across different platforms has been greatly improved and
support for new platforms has been added (additional BSD flavours,
MacOS X 64-bit, Windows 64-bit (MSVC, Cygwin, MinGW)).

Improved coverage of SystemC features, including tests for the new features
and bugfixes added to the 2.3.* releases.


2) Bug fixes and enhancements
=============================

This is a summary of the main changes:

  - Regression script verify.pl has been extended to be more flexible for
    custom platform setups.

    Especially in cases of custom arch suffixes (or library directories)
    used for the SystemC installation, the default location guessing in
    verify.pl may fail.

    New options have been added to affect the compiler/linker invocation and
    architecture selection:
      -arch <arch> Override SystemC architecture.
      -dll         Link against SystemC DLL (Windows/MSVC only).
      -D <symbol>  Additional predefined macros (may be added multiple times).
      -I <dir>     Additional include directory (may be added multiple times).
      -L <dir>     Additional linker directory (may be added multiple times).
      -l <libname> Additional library to link (may be added mutliple times).
      -M(D,T)[d]   Select MSVC runtime library (default: -MT[d]).
      -o <opts>    Additional (custom) compiler options.

  - A new "-recheck" option has been added to verify.pl to rerun the
    tests that failed in a previous run, e.g. to add '-no-cleanup'
    and/or '-g' for further analysis.

  - Added support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2015.


3) Other changes
================

Here is an overview of changes with respect to previous releases:

  - The environment variables RT_ADD_INCLUDES, RT_ADD_LDLIBS, and 
    RT_ADD_LDPATHS now need to omit the compiler flags prefixes
    (-I, -l, -L) and should consist of directories or library names
    only.  Consider to use the new "-I", "-l", "-L" options of the
    verify.pl script.

  - On FreeBSD platforms, the target alias is now assumed to be "bsd(64)",
    instead of "freebsd(64)".  Use the "-arch" option to override this
    change.


4) Known limitations
====================

Here is a list of known limitations in this release:

  - Not all options of the verify.pl script are fully functional.

  - The regression test suite does not cover all the SystemC source code,
    though it is improved compared to previous versions.

  - Some datatype tests take a long time to either compile or run.

  - Some golden log comparisons may fail between compiler versions and/or
    with enabled optimizations.  As long as the differences to the provided
    golden log files are only in the least-significant digits of floating
    point numbers, those changes are assumed to be safely ignorable.

  - Some golden log comparisons may fail in case of disabled/differently
    configured library options.  Check the test output/diff for missing
    features and re-check your SystemC library configuration.

  - Some paths in this release are longer than the historical 99 character
    limit of tar archives, and several Windows archivers (e.g. WinZip)
    have been reported to trip over this.  The open source archiver 7-zip
    (http://7-zip.org) is known to work.
