marcello kernel &ppc64

[Troy Benjegerdes]

> =================
> Which takes me to another, ahem, politically touchy point, I suspect.
> There's a test lab here that pounds the crap out of SuSE kernels.
> Speaking from personal experience, 9 out of 10 or 19 out of 20 of
> the kernel crashes & hangs that they find are *not* in the ppc64 code,
> but are in the generic linux kernel code.   These are races of
> various sorts, missing locks, data corruptions, you name it, I've
> seen it.  These get fixed in the SuSE kernel.

What we need is this testing lab also pounding the crap out of marcelo
kernels..

I was hoping the Linux Test project and the stuff OSDL is doing would
wind up with a 'test suite' that mere mortals with real work to do could
easily run.

Personally, I'd love to be able to build every revision that gets pushed
into the ameslab tree, and then run regression tests on it. And then do
the same thing for the mainline kernels.

It would be a lot easier to defend patches when you can show test logs
of kernel.org kernels failing. OSDL and other internal testing labs are
nice and all, but if we want the mainline kernel fixed, we have to
either test mainline kernels, or make it easy for LKML people to get
access to test results.


>
> And that's what bugs me... I'm perfectly aware that many/most of
> these bugs are also in the marcello kernel.  (For example, the latest:
> a race condition on setting/resetting of current->need_resched,
> which will make a heavily loaded machine go idle.  The setting of
> need_resched uses no locks or semaphores of any kind, but is
> used as if it were always correct.)  But the patches don't go out
> to the LKML because ... well, it can be hard to defend a patch when
> the bug was never seen on a marcello kernel.  So I'm a tad concerned
> that there's a bit of a disconnect not only at the source code level,
> but also at the test level.
>
> (OK, your right, I need to post the need_resched thing to LKML. This
> one, at least, should be easy to explain).
>
> --linas
>
>
>

--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Troy Benjegerdes                'da hozer'                hozer at drgw.net


** Sent via the linuxppc64-dev mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/