[PATCH 0/4] ARM: mvebu: minor Armada 370 RD improvements

Thomas Petazzoni
2014-09-11T14:00:00Z

Dear Andrew Lunn,

On Thu, 11 Sep 2014 15:43:23 +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:

> All looks O.K. to me
>
> Acked-by: Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>

Thanks!

> A point for discussion, triggered by 3/4. We have repeatedly seen
> issues with modular builds, which we don't see with everything built
> in. Can we improve our testing? Is there is way to take for example
> mvebu_v7_defconfig and turn any y tristate options into m? Build and
> boot? Get this added to the boot test farms?

I indeed agree that we are not testing much the modular case, but:

1/ In my case, a mvebu_v7_defconfig where most the stuff would become
enabled as a module would make mvebu_v7_defconfig pretty much
useless for my daily work. When I'm doing active development, I
typically have everything built-in including the initramfs itself,
so that I don't rely on any storage/network to get the rootfs and
additional kernel drivers.

2/ I don't think it would change much in terms of runtime coverage:
the tests done on the boot farm are just boot tests, I don't think
they load any kernel module. We could ask Kevin and Olof what
rootfs they use, but most likely it's some very small rootfs that
doesn't even have udev/mdev for automatic module loading. So no
module would be loaded, which would mean that a mvebu_v7_defconfig
with everything as a module would actually test *less* thing than a
configuration that has everything built in.

So, I agree on the observation, but I'm unsure the proposed solution
will really solve or even improve the situation :/

Best regards,

Thomas
--
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering