Kernel bug triage

[Michał Piotrowski]

Hi,

2010/4/19 Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com>:
> Greetings.
>
> I happened to see the other week that there are currently around 1600
> open kernel bugs in bugzilla against currently supported Fedora
> releases. :( The large majority of them are in NEW, and it's unclear
> how many are at all useful to us.
>
> I'd like to revisit the idea of getting a team of bugzappers working on
> triaging the kernel bugs so we do know more about whats got useful info
> and what does not and let kernel maintainers be able to more clearly
> see what could be worked on.
>
> So, the first question: Would this effort be worthwhile to kernel
> maintainers?
>
> If 'yes', or 'perhaps', I have a bunch more questions about how you
> folks would like to handle things:
>
> - Should bugs showing the user has a tainted kernel be simply closed?
>  Or should reporter be asked to duplicate without the tainting module?
>  Or both? :)

Second option. Oopses in tainted kernels aren't useful for kernel developers.

>
> - Should we ask folks for more info and close bugs after some
>  predefined time? How long should that be?

I reported a two kernel bugs and at least one is still present in .32
(it rather a warning, but still) - reported against 2.6.29.

>
> - Should feature requests be closed and reporter asked to file upstream?

Upstream fixes only upstream bugs AFAIK.

I'm too lazy to build my own kernel ;)

>
> - Should bugs that contain patches get a PATCH subject line or be just
>  asked to report upstream?
>
> - Is there a list of commands that would be helpful to run on any new
>  reported issue? uname/lsmod/dmesg? Anything else? Would smolt
>  profiles be of help?

There was a doc about submiting bug reports
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=tree;f=Documentation;h=c5d59ee59f70869914cf0e775b63a9bc7fca6c79;hb=HEAD

There was also something called oops reporting tool that did the trick.

>
> - Ideally I would like to sort bugs into large buckets based on
>  subsystem, and then put keywords or something on them so subsystem
>  maintainers could easily look at the bugs in their area. What would
>  be a list of such subsystems that would be useful?
>
> - Would it be helpfull to add a keyword or whiteboard on what kernel
>  version it was reported with? Then a search could find all bugs with
>  that particular version (of course it would need to change if
>  reporter updated, etc).
>
> - There seem to be a fair number of 'enable this option' or 'disable
>  this option' type requests. Would they be good to mark ?
>
> I've started a draft page at:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KernelTriage
>
> I'd like to flesh it out more and look at adding some canned responses
> there and then see how much interest there is to do this.
> Comments/edits/shouting welcome. ;)
>
> kevin
>
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