Better testing when patching divers/staging/ - howto?

[mail@beyermatthias.de (Matthias Beyer)]

Hi,

I do big (cleanup) changes in

    drivers/staging/bcm/

Recently, I managed to piss off greg-kh by sending in a patch that
broke the build[0].

After some time off, I want to re-start doing patches in this driver
and of course do better!

What I do by now:

    1) Patching until my task is done. For example outsourcing stuff
    from functions in a file.

    2) Before sending my patchset, compiling the appropriate patches
    like so:

        make drivers/staging/bcm/

    3) If it builds, generating patches, checking them and sending
    them.

        git format-patch gregkh-staging/staging-next..HEAD # more args
        scripts/checkpatch.pl ./00*
        git send-email # some args

The error mentioned in [0] wasn't thrown when doing 2).

My question to you: How to do better? How to test the patches even
more? By building a whole kernel with them? Is that what greg-kh did
and where the error he mentioned in [0] comes from? Or is there a
test-suite-like thing around I just didn't discover yet?

I do not have that much ressources to always build a full kernel for
only one patchset, so would it be okay to (locally) merge my patchsets
into a temporary branch and build a (allyesconfig) kernel out of all
my patchsets?

In addition, I do not have the appropriate hardware to actually _run_
the code. I always state this in my patchset messages, of course!

I hope you guys can help me, as doing kernel patches is a nice hobby
to me and I would like to continue.

[0]: http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/pipermail/driverdev-devel/2014-August/057437.html

-- 
Mit freundlichen Gr??en,
Kind regards,
Matthias Beyer

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