Linux Kernel Gets Fully Automated Test 159
An anonymous reader writes "The Linux Kernel is now getting automatically tested within 15 minutes of a new version being released, across a variety of hardware and the results are being published for all to see. Martin Bligh
announced this yesterday, running on top of IBM's internal test automation system. Maybe this will enable the kernel developers to keep up with the 2.6 kernel's rapid pace of change. Looks like it caught one new problem with last night's build already ..."
Question: (Score:5, Interesting)
How much testing? (Score:2, Interesting)
What took so long (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe... (Score:2, Interesting)
Long uptimes (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope they are using code from the Linux testing suite. That piece of work has already formed a nice set of tests. Also, I hope that the kernel is automatically built with many different combinations of options. And with time, I hope this will become better. The more tests, with the more hardware configurations, with the more kernel configurations, with the more types of input data (including many imaginative forms of incorrect input data to test that the kernel handles it gracefully and thwarts attacks based on such methods), the better quality we will have in the kernel, and it is likely that Linux will be unmatched in quality, stability, efficiency (well, maybe not efficiency necessarily), and long uptimes.
Re:now all we need is automated.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently it works for Samba [samba.org].
That is what aegis does (Score:3, Interesting)
and it can do a lot of other things too, like making sure that each change has an accompagning test and that all tests pass before anybody else is bothered with that change.
The biggest downside for aegis (as I see it) is that it needs to run on a central development server, it is not server based like CVS or the others(it has a cvs-like interface for reading). But OTOH, would it be so hare to have the kernel developers log into a central compile farm where the linux kernel is developed.