Re: Linux 2.6.21

[Jeff Garzik]

IMO, the closer you look, the more warts you find.  Before you starting 
doing your work with kernel regressions, no one was really tracking it. 
 I bet you have helped cut down on the regressions, but I have no good 
way to quantify my gut feeling.

Additional comments on developers and fixing regressions:

* Sometimes seeing a long list, peoples' eyes glaze over.  Its just 
human nature.  A long list also gives us no idea of scale, or severity. 
 I bet a weekly "top 10 bugs and regressions" email would help focus 
developer attention.

* To be effective, lists, either long or top-10, must be pruned if you 
get a sense that only one user is affected.  [With oopses and BUGs as a 
clear exception,] many problems benefit from at least two users 
reporting a bug.

* It gets a bit tiresome to field the large number of driver bug reports 
that eventually turn out to be related to broken interrupt handling 
somehow.  I think we developers need to get better at showing users how 
to isolate driver vs. PCI/ACPI/core bugs.  Maybe drivers need to start 
introducing interrupt delivery tests into their probe code.  Overall, 
broken interrupt handling manifests in several ways, most of which 
initially appear symptomatic of a broken driver.

	Jeff


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/