Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] FS, MM, and stable trees

[Greg KH]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 02:25:12PM -0500, Sasha Levin wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 10:18:03AM +0100, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 11:01:25AM +0200, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> > > Best effort testing in timely manner is good, but a good way to
> > > improve confidence in stable kernel releases is a publicly
> > > available list of tests that the release went through.
> > 
> > We have that, you aren't noticing them...
> 
> This is one of the biggest things I want to address: there is a
> disconnect between the stable kernel testing story and the tests the fs/
> and mm/ folks expect to see here.
> 
> On one had, the stable kernel folks see these kernels go through entire
> suites of testing by multiple individuals and organizations, receiving
> way more coverage than any of Linus's releases.
> 
> On the other hand, things like LTP and selftests tend to barely scratch
> the surface of our mm/ and fs/ code, and the maintainers of these
> subsystems do not see LTP-like suites as something that adds significant
> value and ignore them. Instead, they have a (convoluted) set of testing
> they do with different tools and configurations that qualifies their
> code as being "tested".
> 
> So really, it sounds like a low hanging fruit: we don't really need to
> write much more testing code code nor do we have to refactor existing
> test suites. We just need to make sure the right tests are running on
> stable kernels. I really want to clarify what each subsystem sees as
> "sufficient" (and have that documented somewhere).

kernel.ci and 0-day and Linaro are starting to add the fs and mm tests
to their test suites to address these issues (I think 0-day already has
many of them).  So this is happening, but not quite obvious.  I know I
keep asking Linaro about this :(

Anyway, just having a list of what tests each subsystem things is "good
to run" would be great to have somewhere.  Ideally in the kernel tree
itself, as that's what kselftests are for :)

thanks,

greg k-h