On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 08:03:35AM -0500, James Bottomley wrote: > I also have to say, that for all the complaints there's just not any > open source pull for test tools (there's no-one who's on a mission to > make them better). Demanding that someone else do it is proof of this > (if you cared enough you'd do it yourself). That's why all our testing > infrastructure is just some random set of scripts that mostly does what > I want, because it's the last thing I need to prove the thing I > actually care about works. > Finally testing infrastructure is how OSDL (the precursor to the Linux > foundation) got started and got its initial funding, so corporations > have been putting money into it for decades with not much return (and > pretty much nothing to show for a unified testing infrastructure ... > ten points to the team who can actually name the test infrastructure > OSDL produced) and have finally concluded it's not worth it, making it > a 10x harder sell now. I think that's a *bit* pessimistic, at least for some areas of the kernel - there is commercial stuff going on with kernel testing with varying degrees of community engagement (eg, off the top of my head Baylibre, Collabora and Linaro all have offerings of various kinds that I'm aware of), and some of that does turn into investments in reusable things rather than proprietary stuff. I know that I look at the kernelci.org results for my trees, and that I've fixed issues I saw purely in there. kselftest is noticably getting much better over time, and LTP is quite active too. The stuff I'm aware of is more focused around the embedded space than the enterprise/server space but it does exist. That's not to say that this is all well resourced and there's no problem (far from it), but it really doesn't feel like a complete dead loss either. Some of the issues come from the different questions that people are trying to answer with testing, or the very different needs of the tests that people want to run - for example one of the reasons filesystems aren't particularly well covered for the embedded cases is that if your local storage is SD or worse eMMC then heavy I/O suddenly looks a lot more demanding and media durability a real consideration.
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