Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL for 4.14 015/161] printk: Add console owner and waiter logic to load balance console writes

Jan Kara
2018-04-17T17:57:58Z

On Tue 17-04-18 16:19:35, Sasha Levin wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 05:55:49PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> >> Even regression chance is tricky, look at the commits I've linked
> >> earlier in the thread. Even the most trivial looking commits that end up
> >> in stable have a chance for regression.
> >
> >Sure, you can never be certain and I think people (including me)
> >underestimate the chance of regressions for "trivial" patches. But you just
> >estimate a chance, you may be lucky, you may not...
> >
> >> >Another point I wanted to make is that if chance a patch causes a
> >> >regression is about 2% as you said somewhere else in a thread, then by
> >> >adding 20 patches that "may fix a bug that is annoying for someone" you've
> >> >just increased a chance there's a regression in the release by 34%. And
> >>
> >> So I've said that the rejection rate is less than 2%. This includes
> >> all commits that I have proposed for -stable, but didn't end up being
> >> included in -stable.
> >>
> >> This includes commits that the author/maintainers NACKed, commits that
> >> didn't do anything on older kernels, commits that were buggy but were
> >> caught before the kernel was released, commits that failed to build on
> >> an arch I didn't test it on originally and so on.
> >>
> >> After thousands of merged AUTOSEL patches I can count the number of
> >> times a commit has caused a regression and had to be removed on one
> >> hand.
> >>
> >> >this is not just a math game, this also roughly matches a real experience
> >> >with maintaining our enterprise kernels. Do 20 "maybe" fixes outweight such
> >> >regression chance? And I also note that for a regression to get reported so
> >> >that it gets included into your 2% estimate of a patch regression rate,
> >> >someone must be bothered enough by it to triage it and send an email
> >> >somewhere so that already falls into a category of "serious" stuff to me.
> >>
> >> It is indeed a numbers game, but the regression rate isn't 2%, it's
> >> closer to 0.05%.
> >
> >Honestly, I think 0.05% is too optimististic :) Quick grepping of 4.14
> >stable tree suggests some 13 commits were reverted from stable due to bugs.
> >That's some 0.4% and that doesn't count fixes that were applied to
> >fix other regressions.
>
> 0.05% is for commits that were merged in stable but later fixed or
> reverted because they introduced a regression. By grepping for reverts
> you also include things such as:
>
> - Reverts of commits that were in the corresponding mainline tree
> - Reverts of commits that didn't introduce regressions

Actually I was careful enough to include only commits that got merged as
part of the stable process into 4.14.x but got later reverted in 4.14.y.
That's where the 0.4% number came from. So I believe all of those cases
(13 in absolute numbers) were user visible regressions during the stable
process.

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR