How about a distro-provided bisection facility?

Posted Apr 16, 2008 11:29 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: How about a distro-provided bisection facility? by JoeBuck
Parent article: Bisection divides users and developers

Would the kernel revisions really have to be distributed as source?  Perhaps they could be
distributed as pre-compiled object files.  This would be much quicker for testing, might do
away with the need for scratch space (if there was enough RAM available for linking), and
space could still be saved by only including the object files which had actually changed since
the last revision in a particular revision on the live CD.  kexec could be used to load the
newly linked kernel.

How about a distro-provided bisection facility?

Posted Apr 16, 2008 11:47 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (2 responses)

Or perhaps I am thinking too complicated - some sort of binary diffs should do the trick just
as well or better.

How about a distro-provided bisection facility?

Posted Apr 16, 2008 14:05 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Both of these have the problem that kernel configurations are wildly variable and capable of
enormous variation. This would only be practical for a limited set of distro-compiled kernels
(thus with known .configs), but it might work for them, and that would still be quite useful
(I guess it's more likely that someone who can build their own kernel can bisect it for bugs
as well).

How about a distro-provided bisection facility?

Posted Apr 16, 2008 14:10 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

I think that the original poster was indeed talking about distribution kernels.