Re: what trees/branches to test on syzbot

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Sat, Jun 09, 2018 at 03:17:21PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I think it would be lovely to get linux-next back eventually, but it
> sounds like it's just too noisy right now, and yes, we should have a
> baseline for the standard tree first.
> 
> But once there's a "this is known for the baseline", I think adding
> linux-next back in and then maybe even have linux-next simply just
> kick out trees that cause problems would be a good idea.
> 
> Right now linux-next only kicks things out based on build issues (or
> extreme merge issues), afaik. But it *would* be good to also have
> things like syzbot do quality control on linux-next.

Syzbot is always getting improved to find new classes of problems.  So
the only way to get a baseline would be to use an older version of
syzbot for linux-next, and to have it suppress sending e-mails about
failures that are duplicates that were already found via the mainline
tree.

Then periodically, once version N has run for M weeks, and has spewed
some large number of new failures to LKML, then you could promote
version N to be run against linux-next, and so hopefully the only
thing it would report against linux-next are regressions, and not
duplicates of new bugs also being found via the latest and greatest
version of syzbot being run against the mainline kernel.

						- Ted