Re: Automatic Kernel Bug Report

From: Valdis . Kletnieks
Date: Mon Jul 10 2006 - 13:59:09 EST


On Mon, 10 Jul 2006 12:40:07 CDT, Daniel Bonekeeper said:

> real bugs. If so, they get reported here on LKML. Since we can expect,
> maybe, dozens of thousands of reports per week, wouldn't be hard to
> distinct between real bugs, etc (if we use frequency as a marker).

Actually, at that level, it *is* hard to distinguish. I'm sure the RedHat
people have a *very* good idea of exactly how much PEBKAC cruft their bugzilla
gathers - and that's from users clued enough to bugzilla.

It might be interesting to use it to measure how many machines crap out because
of stray single-bit errors due to insufficient ECC on the hardware.

You can't use "a sudden upsurge" in reports as a good regression test, because
the vast majority of boxes are running distro kernels. RHEL 4.0 just shipped a
2.6.9-34 kernel. Ubuntu is on a 2.6.15.

And the people who are using kernel.org kernels aren't actually upgrading all
*that* fast either. You'll get better info by looking at the lkml postings
that say '2.6.mumble regressed my foobar' - that will likely trigger before any
statistical tendency in bug reports gets noticed.

(Visit the bugzilla.mozilla.org, and note that neither 'most frequently
reported' nor 'reported today' give you a really good grasp on *current*
issues....)

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