Re: Are there kernel testing suites out there? We need them.
Dancer (dancer@zeor.simegen.com)
Mon, 05 Jul 1999 06:10:02 +1000
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
>
> > 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.
I think both ways are good. I don't recall automated testing ever
finding a bug in any of my code that wasn't alpha. However, we _do_ add
tests for bugs that are found and fixed for two reasons: 1) To make sure
we actually fixed it, 2) Sometimes bugs come back - especially when all
your fix did was to temporarily mask it.
Stupid little repeat-glitches are the biggie...especially when you have
more than one person working on the code.
D
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