Re: Automated testing for stable kernel branches?

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 02:24:40PM -0500, Major Hayden wrote:
> Hello there,
> 
> I am working on a project at Red Hat where we do quick testing on
> patches for internal kernels before they merge. The goal is to catch
> bugs or issues before they merge into kernel trees and avoid
> situations where kernels need time-consuming bisects when lots of
> patches are merged at once. We aim to put valuable feedback into a
> kernel developer's inbox within four hours.

Yeah!

> Our team has built a pipeline where we merge patches, compile kernels
> (for various architectures), and run tests on real hardware (various
> architectures). The current test set is fairly basic and it includes
> LTP plus some additional open source tests. We are looking to
> gradually expand those over time as we evaluate which tests provide
> the most value and find the most problems.
> 
> We would love to bring this to upstream kernel repositories and we
> thought that linux-stable might be a good place to start. The
> developer/maintainer experience would look something like this:
> 
>   1) Developer submits a patchset
>   2) Those patches end up in Patchwork
>   3) We pull patches from patchwork, compile kernels, and test them
>   4) We reply to the thread on the mailing list with a brief set of results (one time per patchset)
> 
> Developers do not need to change any existing workflows. We gather the
> patches, test them, and reply in the appropriate place.

Note that not all kernel mailing lists use Patchwork, but I guess you
can always subscribe your own internal copies of it to the lists, right?

> Is this something that the linux-stable community and maintainers
> would find valuable? If so, feel free to ask any questions about our
> process and we can go over any of those parts in more detail. If not,
> please let me know anyway! Our team is always looking for ways to
> improve. :)

You can just go off of my email announcements for the -rc releases and
do testing on that.  That would be a great first step, and if you can
not automatically detect this, I can add you to the email announcement
if you want to trigger off of that.

Also you could watch the linux-stable-rc git tree for updates, that will
be updated at -rc announcement time, and at other "time to take a break"
moments in my development cycle.

Would that work for you?

thanks,

greg k-h