Messages in this thread | | | From | (Ricardo Cañuelo) | Subject | Kernel regression tracking/reporting initiatives and KCIDB | Date | Tue, 01 Aug 2023 13:47:16 +0200 |
| |
Hi all,
I'm Ricardo from Collabora. In the past months, we’ve been analyzing the current status of CI regression reporting and tracking in the Linux kernel: assessing the existing tools, testing their functionalities, collecting ideas about desirable features that aren’t available yet and sketching some of them.
As part of this effort, we wrote a Regression Tracker tool [1] as a proof of concept. It’s a rather simple tool that takes existing regression data and reports and uses them to show more context on each reported regression, as well as highlighting the relationships between them, whether they can be caused by an infrastructure error and other additional metadata about their current status. We’ve been using it mostly as a playground for us to explore the current status of the functionalities provided by CI systems and to test ideas about new features.
We’re also checking other tools and services provided by the community, such as regzbot [2], collaborating with them when possible and thinking about how to combine multiple scattered efforts by different people towards the same common goal. As a first step, we’ve contributed to regzbot and partially integrated its results into the Regression Tracker tool.
So far, we’ve been using the KernelCI regression data and reports as a data source, we're now wondering if we could tackle the problem with a more general approach by building on top of what KCIDB already provides.
In general, CI systems tend to define regressions as a low-level concept which is rather static: a snapshot of a test result at a certain point in time. When it comes to reporting them to developers, there's much more info that could be added to them. In particular, the context of it and the fact that a reported regression has a life cycle:
- did this test also fail on other hardware targets or with other kernel configurations? - is it possible that the test failed because of an infrastructure error? - does the test fail consistently since that commit or does it show unstable results? - does the test output show any traces of already known bugs? - has this regression been bisected and reported anywhere? - was the regression reported by anyone? If so, is there someone already working on it?
Many of these info points can be extracted from the CI results databases and processed to provide additional regression data. That’s what we’re trying to do with the Regression Tracker tool, and we think it’d be interesting to start experimenting with the data in KCIDB to see how this could be improved and what would be the right way to integrate this type of functionality.
Please let us know if that's a possibility and if you'd like to add anything to the ideas proposed above.
Cheers, Ricardo
[1] https://kernel.pages.collabora.com/kernelci-regressions-tracker/ [2] https://linux-regtracking.leemhuis.info/regzbot/all/
| |