Subject: Re: dangers of bots on the mailing lists was Re: divide error in ___bpf_prog_run

From: Theodore Ts'o <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2018 20:09:30 -0500

On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 04:21:13PM -0800, Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
> 
> If syzkaller can only test one tree than linux-next should be the one.

Well, there's been some controversy about that.  The problem is that
it's often not clear if this is long-standing bug, or a bug which is
in a particular subsystem tree --- and if so, *which* subsystem tree,
etc.  So it gets blasted to linux-kernel, and to get_maintainer.pl,
which is often not accurate --- since the location of the crash
doesn't necessarily point out where the problem originated, and hence
who should look at the syzbot report.  And so this has caused
some.... irritation.

> There is some value of testing stable trees, but any developer
> will first ask for a reproducer in the latest, so usefulness of
> reporting such bugs will be limited.

What I suggested was to test Linus's tree, and then when a problem is
found, and syzkaller has a reliable repro, to *then* try to see if it
*also* shows up in the LTS kernels.

					- Ted