On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 05:06:48PM -0500, Tom Gall wrote:
On Oct 13, 2017, at 5:31 AM, Greg KH gregkh@google.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 09, 2017 at 09:44:36AM +0000, Linaro QA wrote:
Summary
kernel: 4.9.54 git repo: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git git branch: linux-4.9.y git commit: f37eb7b586f1dd24a86c50278c65322fc6787722 git describe: v4.9.54 Test details: https://qa-reports.linaro.org/lkft/linux-stable-rc-4.9-oe/build/v4.9.54
Hm, I don't seem to have a test result here for 4.9.55-rc1, so I'm hijacking this thread to ask what happened to the tests there?
Was posted to linux-stable on Oct 11.
Ok, thanks, but was looking for an "internal" one to complain on :)
Turns out that 4.9.55-rc1 did not work at all for networking, yet no tests seem to have caught it. Are we not testing something with a network here? You said you were using NFS, how did that work?
Anything we can do to add to the tests to verify that basic dhcp works? We should learn from our mistakes…
You’ve probably heard me and/or others lament about coverage. I see that is an issue that *we* the linux-stable community need to hash out.
Frankly across the entire android community with all the companies that do some amount of kernel effort, we all should be looking at LTS and thinking about how to test it better. LKFT is really only a start. Failures like you saw this time around, illustrate we need to go further. That’s my session idea over the next year at various open source conferences.
I've been asking for this "help" for over a decade, and no one has cared, until now, when Google realized they were going to be the ones having to drive this, as no one else was. And hence, "LKFT". If this project isn't helping out, then I'm just going to drop the "long term stable" stuff and everyone can go back to how things used to be (i.e. crappy and insecure), as obviously no one cared enough.
Sorry if I sound grumpy about this, but the "tragedy of the commons" is really annoying to me at times.
Now if you can drum up more help and support for this, wonderful, I would love to see that happen. But first off, let's get _this_ project actually working to ensure that 4.4 will be able to be maintained over a long period of time. I think we still have a ways to go, given the other emails this week here...
Putting my Android hat on, it does bug me that we’re not merging and testing the rc LTS patches as part of the rc cycle. It’s work I know but has to be done at some point. Why wait? It sounds like you might be doing this on Google’s infra already?
I do it when I do the merge to the android-common tree. I can try to do it for the -rc releases as well, just to get some testing, but I was _hoping_ that the LKFT work would be doing all of that testing for me (the Google internal treehugger build/boot test is very simple, and not at all reliable.)
I'd rather LKFT provide a framework I could use for it, as all it "should" require is a tree I could push to somewhere {hint}.
Heck, the simple build/boot tests that Google runs instantly found this issue when I tried to merge 4.9.55 into the android-common trees, maybe I should just rely on thost tests from now on?
You’d think that even the linux distro community (if they were watching RCs) should have picked it up as well.
The distros fall into two camps: - rolling distros run by community members or a very limited number of company developers (Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo, Arch, etc.) - enterprise distros
The rolling distros rely on the kernel community to get this right, and provide feedback when they can, but they wait for the "real" release to happen to have a semblance of sanity. In fact, they were the ones that found this bug, so in that sense, they are doing a great job. They notified me within hours about the issue and the fix.
The enterprise distros don't care about stable kernels, or -rcs or anything else, they are of no use to us, or the community, here, other than the fact of them providing a patch stream into Linus's tree for new features that users actually want, and bugfixes that are found by their users over time (i.e. rare bugs).
Gentoo finds a bug, debian doesn’t therefore Debian can’t be trusted. We’ve both lived in that world Greg, and I hope you appreciate the logic when I observe what you are saying is not a fair comment.
Ok, fair enough, it just was a "perfect" storm last week of bugs that were missed by all testers, which made me wonder if any of the testing was actually useful. For all of us to ignore something like this, would be folly.
In the android world there ought to be a fairly good swath of kernel engineers that should deeply care about 6 year (or whatever) LTS and pitch in. It won’t happen overnight.
I can almost guarantee you that it will not happen at all, based on everything I've ever heard from all of the companies involved, Google being the exception here. People want someone else to do the work, and when I ask for help and a list of tasks of what the work is, they have never responded in the past, Linaro included...
So I might be jaded, but please, prove me wrong :)
thanks,
greg k-h