The 2.3.x "Things To Fix" List

Johan Jonasson writes "Alan Cox has posted the first draft of the 2.3.x "Things to fix" list. Also known as "the stuff that has to be taken care of before 2.4 can come out". "

Comments

Re:QA work for linux

[Christopher B. Brown]

This is not all that interesting work, in some ways, but certainly useful stuff.

The necessary methodology involves automating execution of QA tests. You don't want to have to run 'em all by hand...

Approach:

• For each test, X, cd /usr/src/qa/tests/X
• make clean; make test

  This compiles a C program that exercises some facility of the system.

  The program drops output into a local file in the directory, as well as to a central results DB in /usr/src/qa/results , where entries are keyed by test, by date, and by kernel version.

  The notable result is a Pass or Fail value.

• A script runs through all the directories, running each test.

  It would be good if a "success" result caused the test program to create the file success, so that one could run through, after a patch, and "merely" use make success to rerun failed tests.

• Every time you locate a bug, you create a test.
• Every time you find behaviour that ought to be, you create a test.

This is more-or-less how one does regression testing with things like compilers. Tests that run with the kernel would be equally valuable.

If you build a reasonably intelligent infrastructure, and are accepting of regression tests, you'll come to know more about how the kernel works than you ever wanted to know...