Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, 1 May 2008 00:53:31 +0200
Mariusz Kozlowski <m.kozlowski@tuxland.pl> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> > > Perhaps we should be clear and simple about what potential testers 
> > > should be running at any given point in time.  With -mm, linux-next, 
> > > linux-2.6, etc, as a newcomer I find it difficult to know where my 
> > > testing time and energy is best directed.
> 
> Speaking of energy and time of a tester. I'd like to know where these resources
> should be directed from the arch point of view. Once I had a plan to buy as
> many arches as I could get and run a farm of test boxes 8-) But that's hard
> because of various reasons (money, time, room, energy). What arches need more
> attention? Which are forgotten? Which are going away? For example does buying
> an alphaserver DS 20 (hey - it's cheap) and running tests on it makes sense
> these days?
> 

gee.

I think to a large extent this problem solves itself - the "more important"
architectures have more people using them, so they get more testing and
more immediate testing.

However there are gaps.  I'd say that arm is one of the more important
architectures, but many people who are interested in arm tend to shy away
from bleeding-edge kernels for various reasons.  Mainly because they have
real products to get out the door, rather than dinking around with mainline
kernel developement.  So testing bleeding-edge on some arm systems would be
good, I expect.

otoh, the platform we break most often is surely plain-old-PCs.  If it's
bugs you're looking for, I expect that dumpster-diving for as many
different PCs as you can and trying to get them to boot (let alone suspend
and resume!) would keep you entertained ;)