linux-kernel - Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

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Date:	Fri, 02 May 2008 17:05:05 +0300
From:	Tarkan Erimer <tarkan@...one.net.tr>
To:	Stefan Richter <stefanr@...6.in-berlin.de>
CC:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>, rjw@...k.pl,
	davem@...emloft.net, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	jirislaby@...il.com
Subject: Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

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@...emloft.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

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