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

Miles Lane (miles@amazon.com)
Sun, 04 Jul 1999 12:29:00 -0700


Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > 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
>
> Automatic regression tests very rarely help. Most of the bugs that
> get into a shipping kernel now are ones I can't reproduce even given a
> description let alone find randomly

I agree. However, if there is a room full of systems with many hardware
and software configurations and they run a full series of tests on a
regular basis, they will find problems. And sometimes the problems will
be found this way before they would have been found otherwise.

> > 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.
>
> Guess which turns up lemons best, the automated testing or the beta program.

Agreed. But as Dan pointed out, development kernels aren't really
getting
full beta testing. Another great thing about automated testing is that
you
can walk away from the machine and then come back once in a while to see
if
anything failed. Computers are getting so inexpensive these days that I
can
envision maky of us shelling out a few hundred to buy machines to
dedicate
to hammering on the kernel builds. This would be a time and cost
efficient
method to increasing the system configuration testing and thereby making
the
daily testing of development kernels more "beta"like.

Miles

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