linux-kernel - Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reiserfs/kill-bkl tree v2

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Date:	Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:04:40 -0700
From:	Roland Dreier <rdreier@...co.com>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc:	Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@...il.com>,
	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@...e.com>,
	Chris Mason <chris.mason@...cle.com>,
	Alexander Beregalov <a.beregalov@...il.com>,
	Bron Gondwana <brong@...tmail.fm>,
	Reiserfs <reiserfs-devel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
	Andrea Gelmini <andrea.gelmini@...il.com>,
	"Trenton D. Adams" <trenton.d.adams@...il.com>,
	Thomas Meyer <thomas@...3r.de>,
	Alessio Igor Bogani <abogani@...ware.it>,
	Marcel Hilzinger <mhilzinger@...uxnewmedia.de>,
	Edward Shishkin <edward.shishkin@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reiserfs/kill-bkl tree v2


 > Well, dont waste too much time on it (beyond the due diligence 
 > level) - Andi forgot that the right way to stress-test patches is to 
 > get through the review process and then through the integration 
 > trees which have far more test exposure than any single contributor 
 > can test.
 > 
 > Patch submitters cannot possibly test every crazy possibility that 
 > is out there - nor should they: it just doesnt scale. What we expect 
 > people to do is to write clean patches, to test the bits on their 
 > own boxes and submit them to lkml and address specific review 
 > feedback.

I respectfully disagree in this case.  For patches that touch, say,
something hardware dependent where the patch submitter doesn't have all
the variations on the hardware, yes, I agree, scale the testing by
running the code on many machines.  But for the code in question, where
some very fundamental and complex changes are being made to filesystem
locking, I don't think that testing really scales -- after all, if there
is some race then it's quite likely that testers will just see some rare
filesystem corruption, which could easily waste weeks of debugging
before the BKL/reiserfs patches were even implicated.

 - R.
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