That is one way to look at it, but... [LWN.net]

That is one way to look at it, but...

Posted Jan 23, 2015 0:31 UTC (Fri) by PaulMcKenney (✭ supporter ✭, #9624)
In reply to: That is one way to look at it, but... by error27
Parent article: When real validation begins

That might work in some cases, but in the case in this LWN article, the determining factor wasn't the kernel version, but rather the type of workload. People with certain types of HPC or realtime workloads will specify the nohz_full= kernel boot parameter, so I can key off of that to enable RCU callback offloading.

There was a long email thread some years back on how to keep normal users from using new experimental functionality. Dave Jones suggested making the experimental feature splat on boot as the most reliable way to keep most distros from turning it on by default. ;-)

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That is one way to look at it, but...

Posted Jan 29, 2015 14:56 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

No no. Make it detect when it's being run by a distro QA team, and *crash* on boot. Anything else will get overlooked. :)

That is one way to look at it, but...

Posted Jan 29, 2015 15:52 UTC (Thu) by PaulMcKenney (✭ supporter ✭, #9624) [Link] (2 responses)

You do seem to have fully internalized the old saying "Murphy was an optimist"! ;-)

That is one way to look at it, but...

Posted Feb 4, 2015 15:06 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

I was being snarky. Excessively so: the QA people I work with (for Oracle Linux) are better than any other QA people I have ever worked with in any previous job. I can rely on them to find bugs! I can rely on them to proactively think of evil ways to break stuff to find more bugs! This is, to me, amazing: coworkers better at breaking my own stuff than I am, and I don't need to argue for weeks to convince them to do it, either.

(I'm sure all Linux vendors have similarly good QA teams -- I'm just only familiar with the one, and perhaps have had my expectations unduly lowered by awful QA teams in other jobs. I'm sure in e.g. aerospace the QA is even more effective.)

That is one way to look at it, but...

Posted Feb 4, 2015 15:43 UTC (Wed) by PaulMcKenney (✭ supporter ✭, #9624) [Link]

"If it is not broken, fix your tests!!!" ;-)