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

[Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>]

On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 5:32 PM, Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 08:16:33AM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
>> 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