How to test my patches before submitting them to LKML?

[mail@beyermatthias.de (Matthias Beyer)]

On 07-02-2014 11:10:59, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> On Fri, 07 Feb 2014 16:31:04 +0100, Matthias Beyer said:
> 
> > I'm currently working on some stylefix-patches for
> > drivers/cdrom/cdrom.c and I'm slowly getting to a point where they
> > seem to be ready. How to test my patches?
> 
> Note that some maintainers don't like accepting style fix patches,
> because they are of the opinion that there's 2 basic cases.
> 
> The first is that somebody else is doing active work on the driver, and
> this causes merge conflicts when your patches and theirs collide.
> 
> The second is where the code is already stable, and you hit this:
> 
> > I know I should compile them at least, to be sure they build. But how
> > can I test if the code (still) works (the way it is expected to)?
> 
> Yes, it's possible you break some stable code this way.  So the maintainer
> may not want them unless you're doing it as preparation for actual work
> on the driver...
> 

That's true. But how can I get my feet wet _without_ running into the
issue of possibly breaking something? Of course, with testing and all
the stuff... but I'm still a newbie working on running code! I cannot
create a new driver from scratch, as I do not have the capabilities!

> The problem is that whether it's VirtualBox, KVM, or Xen, you're testing
> against a virtualized device, not real hardware.  This isn't as big an issue if
> you're doing filesystem work, or the memory manager or scheduler, but can be a
> problem if you're testing a hardware driver...

So you would say, I should start patching non-hardware driver code,
FS for example, to get my feet wet with the kernel?

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

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