Subject: Re: [BUG] New Kernel Bugs

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:13:56 -0500

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 04:52:32PM +0100, Benoit Boissinot wrote:
> Btw, I used to test every -mm kernel. But since I've switched distros
> (gentoo->ubuntu)
> and I have less time, I feel it's harder to test -rc or -mm kernels (I
> know this isn't a lkml problem
> but more a distro problem, but I would love having an ubuntu blessed
> repo with current dev kernel
> for the latest stable ubuntu release).

There are two parts to this.  One is a Ubuntu development kernel which
we can give to large numbers of people to expand our testing pool.
But if we don't do a better job of responding to bug reports that
would be generated by expanded testing this won't necessarily help us.

The other an automated set of standard pre-built bisection points so
that testers can more easily localize a bug down to a few hundred
commits without needing to learn how to use "git bisect" (think Ubuntu
users).

So for the first, I've actually been playing with some plans to put
together an unofficial kernel that basically "what Ted is using on his
laptop".  It generally has emergency bug fixes that haven't made it
into mainline, plus some other trees where I've been more aggressive
since I want to latest in wireless and powersaving technology, etc.
It has the property that "if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces
--- and I've helpfully included the git ID in the package name so you
can do the bisection yourself".  If you want to try it, the first such
kernel is here:

       http://www.kernel.org/~tytso/tbek

I wasn't planning on talking about it until it was more fully baked,
but if people want something vaguely stable based on 2.6.24-rc2, this
might be interesting.

As for the second, I was just talking to Arjan over pizza and beer
last night, and we reached the same conclusion as Ingo, which is this
really isn't that hard.  It wouldn't be that hard to set up
infrastructure to do this, and it's just a matter of getting the disk
space and the network bandwidth togehter in the right place, plus a
relatively small amount of prgramming at least for the simplest
iteration of the idea.  (As is quite common when doing designs over
beer, we talked about some more gradious web-based schemes to do
custom built kernels that was tied to the kernel bugzilla, but first
things first. :-)

						- Ted