Re: No care given to GDB scripts..

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Wed Nov 29 2023 - 18:06:42 EST


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/?