On Sun, Jul 08, 2018 at 08:33:37PM +1000, Michael Ellerman wrote:
Ingo Molnar mingo@kernel.org writes:
- Michael Ellerman mpe@ellerman.id.au wrote:
Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh@linuxfoundation.org writes:
On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 01:36:43PM +0200, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
On 06/18/2018 10:13 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
4.16-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.
So I was wondering, why backport such a considerable number of *selftests* to stable, given the stable policy? Surely selftests don't affect the kernel itself breaking for users?
These came in as part of Sasha's "backport fixes" tool. It can't hurt to add selftest fixes/updates to stable kernels, as for some people, they only run the selftests for the specific kernel they are building. While others run selftests for the latest kernel on older kernels, both of which are valid ways of testing.
I don't have a problem with these sort of patches being backported, but it seems like Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.txt could use an update?
I honestly don't know what the rules are anymore.
Self-tests are standalone tooling which help the testing of the kernel, and it makes sense to either update all of them, or none of them.
Yes I know what selftests are.
Here it makes sense to update all of them, because if a self-test on a stable kernel shows a failure then a fix is probably missing from -stable, right?
Usually, though it's not always that simple IME.
But sure, I don't have a problem with updating selftests, I said that before.
Also note that self-test tooling *cannot possibly break the kernel*, because they are not used in the kernel build process, so the normally conservative backporting rules do not apply.
Right. So stable-kernel-rules.txt could use an update to mention that.
My comment was less about this actual patch and more about the new reality of patches being backported to stable based on Sasha's tooling, which seems to be much more liberal than anything we've done previously.
I don't generally have any objection to that process, though it possibly could have been more widely announced. But, it would be good if stable-kernel-rules.txt was updated to mention it.
I've had several people ask me "hey my patch got backported to stable but I didn't ask for it - is that OK, what's going on?" etc.
Why didn't those people just ask us? To not do so is very strange, it's not like we are hard to find :)
I guess I should just send a patch to update it, but I don't really know what it should say.
I don't think it really needs any changes, as the selftests is just a corner case that is easily explained if anyone cares enough to actually ask :)
thanks,
greg k-h