linux-kernel - Re: bug-introducing patches

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Date:   Tue, 1 May 2018 20:42:18 +0000
From:   Sasha Levin <Alexander.Levin@...rosoft.com>
To:     Willy Tarreau <w@....eu>
CC:     "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>,
        "ksummit-discuss@...ts.linuxfoundation.org" 
        <ksummit-discuss@...ts.linuxfoundation.org>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        "julia.lawall@...6.fr" <julia.lawall@...6.fr>,
        "linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: bug-introducing patches

On Tue, May 01, 2018 at 10:33:25PM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
>On Tue, May 01, 2018 at 08:00:21PM +0000, Sasha Levin wrote:
>> What's worse is that that commit is tagged for stable, which means
>> that (given Greg's schedule) it may find it's way to -stable users
>> even before some -next users/bots had a chance to test it out.
>
>But it's a difficult trade-off. I think that -next is mostly used by
>developers and that as such the audience remains limited. On the
>opposite, -stable is used by many users. So how many days of -next
>does it take to get the equivalent coverage of one day of -stable,
>I don't know but it's probably a lot. Also server workloads are
>almost exclusively on -stable. So a bug affecting only server users
>will not benefit from -next exposition.
>
>In the end it's all about responding to users' expectations to see
>the bugs fixed. In -stable we regularly see users asking to backport
>certain fixes. Sometimes they have to wait one or two extra versions
>before they get their fix, and they are really not happy at all. If
>the fix is rushed too fast and doesn't work, they won't be happy
>either. Making them happy means backporting the right fix the quickest
>possible. Too little test can result in a wrong fix, but too much test
>results in a slow backport.
>
>Again, I really don't find the -stable situation bad nowadays, quite
>the opposite. I often suggest to people who don't follow too closely
>to stick to latest LTS minus 1 or 2 releases. This way they don't get
>the very latest fixes and have a chance that if something breaks very
>badly, it gets fixed quickly. It works pretty well apparently.
>
>I suspect that some of the issues that really need to be improved are
>the fixes to recently merged code. That's never easy by definition
>because if the code is young, it's not yet very well known even by
>its author.
>
>What *could* possibly be done (though I'm not fond of this) would be
>to state a rule that past a certain number of stacked fixes for a
>recently merged code, an extra review delay will be enforced on the
>subsystem or on patches coming from the submitter. But I really doubt
>it would significantly improve the situation.

I think that this discussion has shifted to -stable issues, which is not
what I was aiming for.

I tried to present a statistic from the recent kernel commits showing
that per changed line of code, an -rc commit has more than 3 times the
likelyhood to introduce a bug rather than a merge window one.

Is this something the community sees as an issue, or do we expect a
significantly higher odds of introducing bugs in -rc commits?

Feed free to ignore any proposals I've made. If you see this as an
issue, what could we do to address it?

Let's leave -stable out of this for now.