Re: [PATCH 2/2] selftests: New x86 breakpoints selftest

[Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 03:32:23PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri,  2 Dec 2011 16:41:15 +0100
> Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Bring a first selftest in the relevant directory.
> 
> That all looks nice and simple, thanks.  Unless I get suitably shouted
> at I think I'll send all this Linuswards.  Then I can hassle people to
> add their little test snippets as they add userspace-visible features.
> 
> I don't think we'd ever want to turn this into some huge kernel
> verification suite.  My thinking here is that I frequently see that
> people have written little test cases for their new feature, but those
> test cases just die after the feature is merged.  It would be better to
> maintain and grow these tests as the relevant features are augmented or
> bugfixed.

Exactly. And I also think this is no good place for background long running
stress-tests but rather for correctness tests (Unless we find situations
where short stress-tests are enough to trigger correctness problems).
That's really targeted to spot ABI breakages or alike.

My selftest for the cgroup task counter subsystem is also a good candidate for
that (if that subsystem ever get merged but that's a separate debate ;)

> 
> All these features are Linux-specific.  Standard interface features (eg
> POSIX) are and should be tested via other externally-maintained test
> suites.
> 
> If the whole idea ends up not working out, we can just delete it all.

Agreed, let the selftest subsystem selftest itself for a while and we'll figure
out.

Thanks.