Re: [BUG] New Kernel Bugs

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 03:18:07PM -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
Russell King wrote:
On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 09:08:32AM -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
Ingo Molnar wrote:
..
This is all QA-101 that _cannot be argued against on a rational basis_,
it's just that these sorts of things have been largely ignored for
years, in favor of the all-too-easy "open source means many eyeballs and
that is our QA" answer, which is a _good_ answer but by far not the most
intelligent answer! Today "many eyeballs" is simply not good enough and
nature (and other OS projects) will route us around if we dont change.
..

QA-101 and "many eyeballs" are not at all in opposition.
The latter is how we find out about bugs on uncommon hardware,
and the former is what we need to track them and overall quality.

A HUGE problem I have with current "efforts", is that once someone
reports a bug, the onus seems to be 99% on the *reporter* to find
the exact line of code or commit. Ghad what a repressive method.

99% on the reporter? Is that why I always try to understand the
reporters problem (*provided* it's in an area I know about) and come
up with a patch to test a theory or fix the issue?
..

Same here.

I just find it weird that something can be known broken for several -rc*
kernels before I happen to install it, discover it's broken on my own machine,
and then I track it down, fix it, and submit the patch, generally all within a
couple of hours. Where the heck was the dude(ess) that broke it ?? AWOL.

Same thing can be said for compile breakages as well. Looking at the
latest kautobuild output:

ARM ep93xx defconfig has been broken since 2.6.23-git1 due to:

drivers/net/arm/ep93xx_eth.c:420: error: implicit declaration of function '__netif_rx_schedule_prep'

caused by: [NET]: Make NAPI polling independent of struct net_device objects.

ARM netx defconfig has been broken since 2.6.23-git1 due to:

drivers/net/netx-eth.c: In function 'netx_eth_hard_start_xmit':
drivers/net/netx-eth.c:131: error: 'dev' undeclared (first use in this function)
drivers/net/netx-eth.c:131: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
drivers/net/netx-eth.c:131: error: for each function it appears in.)
drivers/net/netx-eth.c: In function 'netx_eth_receive':
drivers/net/netx-eth.c:158: error: 'dev' undeclared (first use in this function)

caused by: [NET] drivers/net: statistics cleanup #1 -- save memory and shrink code

Haven't got a report for either of those, but Kautobuild lets people
know if folk can be bothered to subscribe to its mailing list and/or
look at the site occasionally.

I suspect the maintainers of the above drivers aren't aware that their
drivers are broken.

--
Russell King
Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
maintainer of:
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