Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 04 Jul 1999 12:29:00 -0700 | From | Miles Lane <> | Subject | Re: Are there kernel testing suites out there? We need them. |
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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
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