Re: Are there kernel testing suites out there? We need them.

Dan Kegel (dank@alumni.caltech.edu)
Sun, 04 Jul 1999 10:26:00 -0700


Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Miles Lane wrote:
>
> > One of the things Micro$oft does is stress test Windows NT after
> > every build.
>
> Looking at the quality of Windows NT should be enough to establish
> the usefulness of such a test...
>
> Stresstesting a Linux kernel on a known-good piece of hardware
> will only show up the most obvious bugs and not the typical
> race conditions and marginal-hardware cases that bother us most.

Let's leave NT out of this, shall we? Regression tests like the
ones Miles are proposing are just sanity checks to make
sure nothing's gone south lately in your implementation.

The other main point about automated regression tests is that
they take no work on the part of the kernel developers to run.

At the moment, the regression test for new Linux kernels
is "Let a couple hundred people download it and see
if they notice any problems" :-)

That works, but adding a mechanized regression test would
be painless, and might give us earlier warnings if and when
a few bad things (like ext2 fs corruption) creep back into
the kernel. Earlier warnings about problems are what
corporations love. Red Hat, for instance, might well feel
inclined to set up a mechanized regression test to give
it a little added certainty that it's not about to ship a lemon.
- Dan

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