[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] kernel testing standard

[Daniel Vetter]

On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 10:30 AM, Geert Uytterhoeven
<geert at linux-m68k.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 8:54 AM, Mel Gorman <mgorman at suse.de> wrote:
>> There is a hazard that someone bisecting the tree would need to be careful
>> to not bisect LTP instead.
>
> That may actually be a good reason not to import LTP...
> I'd imagine you usually want to bisect the kernel to find when a regression
> was introduced in the syscall API.
>
> Is there a reason not to run the latest version of LTP (unless bisecting
> LTP ;-)? The syscall API is supposed to be stable.

Same for validating backports - you want the latest testsuite to make
sure you don't miss important fixes. Downside is that the testsuite
needs to be compatible over a much wider range of kernels to be
useful, which is a pain for e.g. checking that garbage in reserved
fields (like reserved flags) are properly rejected on each kernel
version.

For drm/i915 testing we try to have limited compat for a few kernel
releases (mostly for our own release testing), but still end up with a
few wontfix bugs each release because we've fumbled it (or figured
it's not worth the effort to make the tests more complicated).
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch