Re: [PATCH] ext4: memory leakage in ext4_mb_init()

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>]

jing zhang wrote:
> 2010/4/5, tytso@mit.edu <tytso@mit.edu>:
>> On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 09:05:14AM +0800, jing zhang wrote:
>>
>> How much testing are you doing before submitting patches, out of
>> curiosity?
> 
> Yes, Ted, it is curiosity that drives me to do hard works, including patch ext4.

It is the language barrier that is making some of this difficult,
but I'm not complaining - you speak English much better than I speak any
second language.  :)

Ted meant that -he- was curious about how much testing you were doing.

...

> And after operations on cmdline, I compile the modified, modprobe, dd,
> and rmmod with virtual machine. It is not hard.

More testing than this would be good; dd is very minimal.

One of our new standard tests for et4 is the xfstests test suite from 
http://git.kernel.org/?p=fs/xfs/xfstests-dev.git;a=summary

It is a collection of many tests developed for xfs, but many tests are
generic and can run on ext4 as well.  I would suggest that after you have
several patches ready, you should at least run through the tests in this
collection.  It won't catch every mistake but it runs a large variety of 
tests, much more stressful than dd.

Thanks for your email, and thanks for clearly spending time looking for
ways to improve ext4.  I think that with practice, you will be a good 
contributor.

Ted can certainly be a patient maintainer - read his suggestions and the
kernel patch submission guidelines, and I think you will get better at this.

Do your best to explain the reasons for your patches, and any testing you
have done, and describe any test which can show a bug that you find - 
and we can help to clarify changelogs if they need it.

-Eric