Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] & [TECH TOPIC] Improve regression tracking

On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 5:32 PM, Greg KH [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 08:16:33AM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:

quoted

If we start shaming people for not providing unit tests, all we'll accomplish is
that people will stop providing bug fixes.

Yes, this is the key!

Steven, just look at everything marked with a "Fixes:" or "stable@" tag
from 4.12-rc1..4.12 and try to determine how you would write a test for
the majority of them.

Yes, for some subsystems this can work (look at xfstests as one great
example for filesystems, same for the i915 tests), but for the majority
of the kernel, at this point in time, it doesn't make sense.

So take Carlos's advice, start small, do it for your subsystem if you
don't touch hardware (easy peasy, right?), and let's see how it goes,
and see if we have the infrastructure to do it even today.  Right now,
kselftests is finally getting a unified output format, which is great,
it shows that people are starting to use and rely on it.  What else will
we need to make this more widely used, we don't know yet...

This is very hard work and takes a long time. Since 3 years I'm trying
to establish the i915 test suite as an overall drm validation set. At
least the generic parts like for the cross-driver kernel modeset
interfaces, but also allowing other drivers to test their hw specific
command submission. It's very slow going ...
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch