[Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Distribution kernel bugzillas considered harmful

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 09:44:23AM -0700, Laura Abbott wrote:
>>It would be awesome to have a "bisect at home" type of thing with a 
>>similar
>>idea like seti at home and folding at home. Have a central queue where
>>developers can submit upstream commits and testcases, and a swarm of
>>volunteer drones would grab and bisect-build them until the
>>bug-introducing commit is identified and reported back.
>>
>>I'll totally host the hell out of this.
>>
>Developers usually have no problem building and bisecting kernels,
>it's non-kernel developers who often struggle with bisection.
>One idea that I haven't followed up on was to extend the existing
>targets for building distro packages to just build the source
>side of things and then take advantage of existing environments
>(e.g. COPR) to build the package binaries. I'd love a web interface
>that would handle some of this automatically but, again, lack of
>resources and knowledge of web frameworks.

I'm excited that kernelci.org is coming on board as a full-fledged Linux 
Foundation project, since I'm hoping that their charter would include 
funding this kind of development. [1] I was already chatting with Kevin 
about some of the cool things we could do to make various 
CI/fuzzing/bug-reporting tools more streamlined, so I'll add "bisecting 
as a service" to my list of suggestions for the glorious kernel CI tool 
of the future. :)

-K

[1] I don't bring this up too often, but kernel.org's official 
organizational purpose is "to distribute the Linux kernel and other Open 
Source software to the public without charge" -- so drifting too far 
away from such activity could potentially jeopardize its legal standing 
as far as non-profit filing paperwork is concerned. This is why we can 
organize funding for things like public-inbox and lore.kernel.org, but 
not other things that wouldn't be overall related to "distributing the 
Linux kernel free of charge."