The -mm of the minute tree [LWN.net]

The -mm of the minute tree

Posted Nov 14, 2007 19:20 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386)
In reply to: The -mm of the minute tree by MighMoS
Parent article: The -mm of the minute tree

A way to get less bugs is by detecting them early. Having an unstable branch in the form of
-mm means that mainline doesn't become that testing branch. At least that's the idea.

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The -mm of the minute tree

Posted Nov 15, 2007 14:57 UTC (Thu) by dan_linder (guest, #88) [Link]

Didn't someone come up with a distributed system that would take an entire kernel tree and
step through many combinations of the configuration options and run the full kernel compile,
tracking which compiles worked and which died?

My home systems sits idle from 8-5 (with the exception of some of the Folding@Home and other
related distributed tools).  If someone could point us toward this tool, I could feel like I
was assisting the Kernel project in some small way. :-)

Dan

The -mm of the minute tree

Posted Nov 15, 2007 16:49 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]

I think I know what you mean. There were those nice red/green matrix for which kernel version
worked (compiled/booted) and which not, per architecture, right? Or was that something else? I
don't remember who that person was, Dave Jones perhaps? There are a few people with good
testing environments/compile clusters, but I'm not aware of anyone releasing their hacked up
test scripts.

As for generating a random config, you can do "make randconfig" nowaday. So it's rather easy
to automate a random config, install, reboot, and test report. You can also run some
benchmarks/test to check for regressions with your normal config. http://ltp.sourceforge.net
seems like a good start.

If you want to do something more useful, but less automated, you could try out different
patches to see if they work or not (personally I'm mostly interested in VM patches, but
whatever you fancy).

The -mm of the minute tree

Posted Nov 15, 2007 18:09 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]

Mingo seems to be the one (or one of them):
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/11/15/202

The -mm of the minute tree

Posted Nov 15, 2007 18:12 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]

Oh dear, what an embarrassing typo, noticed it a split second too late. If I'm lucky it's his
LWN account name, and I've some sort of sleazy excuse. Now let's hope no one notices it... ;-)

The -mm of the minute tree

Posted Nov 15, 2007 19:18 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

It is his LWN account name, actually.  I didn't notice it as a typo until you pointed it out,
for that reason.

The -mm of the minute tree

Posted Nov 16, 2007 21:19 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's also his email address, so in a sense it's not wrong at all :)