Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] stable kernel process automation and improvement

Takashi Iwai
2019-07-08T14:33:31Z

On Mon, 08 Jul 2019 16:05:44 +0200,
Guenter Roeck wrote:
>
> On 7/8/19 5:37 AM, Mark Brown wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 08, 2019 at 07:02:08AM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
> >> On Sat, Jul 06, 2019 at 01:32:14AM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> >
> >>> I'm not saying leave it alone, it's more a question of how
> >>> aggressive we are about picking up things we think might be
> >>> relevant fixes but haven't had some sort of domain specific
> >>> analysis of. Testing is a good way to mitigate the potential
> >>> risks here.
> >
> >> I agree, and for various subsystems and drivers where the maintainers
> >> volunteer their domain specific expertise to send backports to stable, I
> >> have "blacklisted" it from AUTOSEL since indeed it's a much better
> >> option.
> >
> > Hrm, it's definitely getting a bunch of stuff for my subsystems
> > where I do tag things for stable...
> >
> >>>> This came up in the last MS, and the agreement there was that we expect
> >>>> stable kernel users to test their workloads before throwing it into
> >>>> production.
> >
> >>> That's kind of the problem - if people are doing testing and end
> >>> up finding problems coming back in the stable kernel that's the
> >>> sort of thing that encourages them to not just take stable en
> >>> masse as we say they should. Part of the deal with stable is
> >>> that it is conservative, people can trust it to be a low risk
> >>> update. That's not happening now as far as I'm aware but it does
> >>> worry me that it might happen.
> >
> >> Right, and the rate at which AUTOSEL commits are reverted is lower than
> >> commits that are actually tagged for stable. If AUTOSEL commits on their
> >> own were being reverted left and right I'd agree we need to tone it
> >> down, but I don't see it happening now.
> >
> > I'm not sure how many people will actually report problems they
> > experience upstream rather than just fixing things locally and
> > just moving on. The more code is the more likely it is that one
> > of the users will report things.
> >
>
> I for my part will most definitely report any such problems, since each
> regression in stable releases is used as argument against merging
> stable releases (even if the regression rate is negligible), and I am
> very interested in getting that regression rate as close to zero as
> possible. Reporting each and every regression is an essential part
> of that.

BTW, regarding regression: currently we have no central regression
tracking. This is another big missing piece, and a thing to be
discussed in KS, IMO.

thanks,

Takashi