RE: CKI hackfest @Plumbers invite

[<Tim.Bird@sony.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Veronika Kabatova 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> as some of you have heard, CKI Project is planning hackfest CI meetings after
> Plumbers conference this year (Sept. 12-13). We would like to invite
> everyone
> who has interest in CI for kernel to come and join us.
> 
> The early agenda with summary is at the end of the email. If you think there's
> something important missing let us know! Also let us know in case you'd
> want to
> lead any of the sessions, we'd be happy to delegate out some work :)
> 
> 
> Please send us an email as soon as you decide to come and feel free to invite
> other people who should be present. We are not planning to cap the
> attendance
> right now but need to solve the logistics based on the interest. The event is
> free to attend, no additional registration except letting us know is needed.
> 
> Feel free to contact us if you have any questions,

I plan to come to the event.

> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Here is an early agenda we put together:
> - Introductions
> - Common place for upstream results, result publishing in general
>   - The discussion on the mailing list is going strong so we might be able to
>     substitute this session for a different one in case everything is solved by
>     September.
> - Test result interpretation and bug detection
>   - How to autodetect infrastructure failures, regressions/new bugs and test
>     bugs? How to handle continuous failures due to known bugs in both tests
> and
>     kernel? What's your solution? Can people always trust the results they
>     receive?
> - Getting results to developers/maintainers
>   - Aimed at kernel developers and maintainers, share your feedback and
>     expectations.
>   - How much data should be sent in the initial communication vs. a click away
>     in a dashboard? Do you want incremental emails with new results as they
> come
>     in?
>   - What about adding checks to tested patches in Patchwork when patch
> series
>     are being tested?
>   - Providing enough data/script to reproduce the failure. What if special HW
>     is needed?
> - Onboarding new kernel trees to test
>   - Aimed at kernel developers and maintainers.
>   - Which trees are most prone to bring in new problems? Which are the most
>     critical ones? Do you want them to be tested? Which tests do you feel are
>     most beneficial for specific trees or in general?
> - Security when testing untrusted patches
>   - How do we merge, compile, and test patches that have untrusted code in
> them
>     and have not yet been reviewed? How do we avoid abuse of systems,
>     information theft, or other damage?
>   - Check out the original patch that sparked the discussion at
>     https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/862123/
> - Avoiding effort duplication
>   - Food for thought by GregKH
>   - X different CI systems running ${TEST} on latest stable kernel on x86_64
>     might look useless on the first look but is it? AMD/Intel CPUs, different
>     network cards, different graphic drivers, compilers, kernel configuration...
>     How do we distribute the workload to avoid doing the same thing all over
>     again while still running in enough different environments to get the most
>     coverage?
> - Common hardware pools
>   - Is this something people are interested in? Would be helpful especially for
>     HW that's hard to access, eg. ppc64le or s390x systems. Companies could
> also
>     sing up to share their HW for testing to ensure kernel works with their
>     products.

I have strong opinions on some of these, but maybe only useful experience
in a few areas.  Fuego has 2 separate notions, which we call "skiplists"
and "pass criteria", which have to do with this bullet:

- How to autodetect infrastructure failures, regressions/new bugs and test
     bugs? How to handle continuous failures due to known bugs in both
     tests and kernel? What's your solution? Can people always trust the results they
     receive?

I'd be happy to discuss this, if it's desired.

Otherwise, I've recently been working on standards for "test definition",
which defines the data and meta-data associated with a test.   I could talk
about where I'm at with that, if people are interested.

Let me know what you think.
 -- Tim