Re: linus-next: improving functional testing for to-be-merged pull requests

Luis Chamberlain
2024-10-24T17:53:21Z

On Thu, Oct 24, 2024 at 02:49:28AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> Now I have to ask. What's the benefit of pushing to linux-next over
> waiting for the zero-day bot?

0-day only does build tests by default, there are many places which have
actual run time tests which *run* off of linux-next, those are both bots
and human. Granted you can get your own run time tests out of your own
branches but that's on each developer to set up and a developer's test
exposure of just one branch is small compared to linux-next. For example
I've seen obscure bugs creep up on linux-next for modules which only some
odd arch or setup was able to capture before which no test we had during
development was able to capture. So more exposure to system variability
and test variability.

The other benefit is you get to see *way ahead of time* possible merge
conflicts, and if you can coordinate with the respective maintainers
which your code conflicts with, you can prepare so that this is smooth
sailing upon pull request to Linus.

Luis