Re: No care given to GDB scripts..

[Florian Fainelli]

On 11/29/23 15:06, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Nov 2023 14:48:02 -0800 Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > It is quite clear that there are zero cares being given to making sure
> > that GDB scripts continue to work after making changes to core kernel
> > code, and why would you, because you probably did not know those
> > existed, but they do and they are used, and useful.
> >
> > A recent example that was fixed by Kuan-Ying is this:
> >
> > and now of course, "lx-interupts" also stopped working altogether after
> > this change:
> >
> > https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230519134902.1495562-4-sdonthineni@xxxxxxxxxx
> >
> > and who knows what else I could not test that is also broken.
> >
> > We really need to find a better way to stop breaking GDB scripts, they
> > break way too often to be even remotely usable, and this is really sad.
> >
> > It is also quite clear that we do not have enough continuous integration
> > and regression testing to ensure those breakages are caught ahead of time...
>
> This isn't terribly surprising - the gdb scripts are a pretty remote
> corner and are peculiarly sensitive to getting damaged by routine
> kernel development.
>
> Is there any way of scripting the scripts so we can have some sort of
> automated testing down under tools/testing/selftests/?

That might be a bit difficult to do as this would mean that we can self 
debug and introspect using gdb the live kernel. Testing using QEMU is 
definitively doable however. Of course, I just found another script that 
broke (device.py)!
--
Florian