Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

Tarkan Erimer
2008-05-02T14:05:21Z

Stefan Richter wrote:
> Tarkan Erimer wrote:
>> To improve the quality of kernel releases, maybe we can create a
>> special kernel testing tool.
>
> A variety of bugs cannot be caught by automated tests. Notably those
> which happen with rare hardware, or due to very specific interaction
> with hardware, or with very special workloads.
Of course,it's impossible to test all the things/scenarios. Just, that
kind of tool, should allow us to minimize the issues that we will face.

>
> An interesting thing to investigate would be to start at the
> regression meta bugs at bugzilla.kernel.org, go through all bugs on
> which are linked from there, and try to figure out
> - if these bugs could have been found by automated or at least
> semiautomatic tests on pre-merge code, and
> - how those tests had to have looked like, e.g. what equipment would
> have been necessary.
>
> Let's look back at the posting at the thread start:
> | On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 10:03 AM, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
> wrote:
> | > Yesterday, I spent the whole day bisecting boot failures
> | > on my system due to the totally untested linux/bitops.h
> | > optimization, which I fully analyzed and debugged.
> ...
> | > Yet another bootup regression got added within the last 24
> | > hours.
>
> Bootup regressions can be automatically caught if the necessary
> machines are available, and candidate code gets exposure to test parks
> of those machines. I hear this is already being done, and
> increasingly so. But those test parks will ever only cover a tiny
> fraction of existing hardware and cannot be subjected to all code
> iterations and all possible .config permutations, hence will have
> limited coverage of bugs.
>
> And things like the bitops issue depend on review much more than on
> tests, AFAIU.
My idea is also hunting the bugs more easily via a tool like this that
has a console/X interface and ability to bisect. So; users,who has
little or no knowledge about git/bisect, can easily try to find out the
problematic commits/bugs.

Tarkan