From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Willy Tarreau Subject: Re: Reporting bugs and bisection Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:00:18 +0200 Message-ID: <20080414100018.GA10378@1wt.eu> References: <47FEADCB.7070104@rtr.ca> <22880.1207943922@turing-police.cc.vt.edu> <47FFE5DA.8000709@imap.cc> <200804132040.12138.rjw@sisk.pl> <20080413184730.GD8474@1wt.eu> <874pa4wyfj.fsf@basil.nowhere.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" , Tilman Schmidt , Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu, Mark Lord , David Miller , jesper.juhl@gmail.com, yoshfuji@linux-ipv6.org, jeff@garzik.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton To: Andi Kleen Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <874pa4wyfj.fsf@basil.nowhere.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 11:58:08AM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: > Willy Tarreau writes: > > > Linux is the *only* product which requires > > the bug reporter to find the fault change (yes, I know, it's scalable). > > It's a pretty common procedure for compilers (gcc, llvm) too, although > they have the advantage that given a test case usually someone else > can run the bisect procedure because they do not depend on the underlying > hardware > > That's unfortunately not the case for most kernel bugs, although > sometimes it is possible given a hardware independent test case. And > while most of the kernel code is drivers and arch, a lot of it is > still pretty hardware independent, so at least in some cases it is > possible to submit test cases and then let someone else (like a bug > master) do the bisect. > > Of course it is unclear if producing a submittable test case will be > actually any faster than just running bisect for the user. > > That said I agree it's a big burden to run bisect for everything > because it can take very long (especially if the problem > is not trivially reproducable) > > It would be fair at least if maintainers always gave some candidate > commit ids when asking for bisect for likely changes that could > have matched the bug. Then those could be checked quickly first > before doing the full run. > > While that will not always work it would be still a useful short cut > and save a lot of time for the reporter. And most of all, the reporter would not feel like the bisection is the default response ! > -Andi Willy