On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 02:24:40PM -0500, Major Hayden wrote:
Hello there,
I am working on a project at Red Hat where we do quick testing on patches for internal kernels before they merge. The goal is to catch bugs or issues before they merge into kernel trees and avoid situations where kernels need time-consuming bisects when lots of patches are merged at once. We aim to put valuable feedback into a kernel developer's inbox within four hours.
Yeah!
Our team has built a pipeline where we merge patches, compile kernels (for various architectures), and run tests on real hardware (various architectures). The current test set is fairly basic and it includes LTP plus some additional open source tests. We are looking to gradually expand those over time as we evaluate which tests provide the most value and find the most problems.
We would love to bring this to upstream kernel repositories and we thought that linux-stable might be a good place to start. The developer/maintainer experience would look something like this:
- Developer submits a patchset
- Those patches end up in Patchwork
- We pull patches from patchwork, compile kernels, and test them
- We reply to the thread on the mailing list with a brief set of results (one time per patchset)
Developers do not need to change any existing workflows. We gather the patches, test them, and reply in the appropriate place.
Note that not all kernel mailing lists use Patchwork, but I guess you can always subscribe your own internal copies of it to the lists, right?
Is this something that the linux-stable community and maintainers would find valuable? If so, feel free to ask any questions about our process and we can go over any of those parts in more detail. If not, please let me know anyway! Our team is always looking for ways to improve. :)
You can just go off of my email announcements for the -rc releases and do testing on that. That would be a great first step, and if you can not automatically detect this, I can add you to the email announcement if you want to trigger off of that.
Also you could watch the linux-stable-rc git tree for updates, that will be updated at -rc announcement time, and at other "time to take a break" moments in my development cycle.
Would that work for you?
thanks,
greg k-h