Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] kselftests: livepatch: Adapt tests to be executed on 4.12 kernels

Marcos Paulo de Souza
2026-04-16T18:18:41Z

On Thu, 2026-04-16 at 10:07 -0700, Josh Poimboeuf wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 02:26:11PM -0300, Marcos Paulo de Souza
> wrote:
> > A new version of the patchset, with fewer patches now. Please take
> > a look!
> >
> > Original cover-letter:
> > These patches don't really change how the patches are run, just
> > skip
> > some tests on kernels that don't support a feature (like kprobe and
> > livepatched living together) or when a livepatch sysfs attribute is
> > missing.
> >
> > The last patch slightly adjusts check_result function to skip dmesg
> > messages on SLE kernels when a livepatch is removed.
>
> Why are we adding complexity to support Linux 4.12 in mainline?
> Isn't
> that what enterprise distros are for?

These changes do not add any new complex code, just checks to enable
the tests to run on older kernels. I believe that it would be good for
all enterprises distros if they could run more tests in maintenance
updates of their kernels using the upstream tests.

The changes are not really that big. Some patches were removed from v1
because there were adding checks for out-of-tree messages (like the
last paragraph of the v2 erroneously shows), and another one was to
check if kprobes could live alongside livepatches, which fails for 4.12
kernels.

The patches for this versions introduce only checks to avoid testing
sysfs attributes for kernels that don't supports them.