91–100 of 115 posts
Huge impactful problem....
Gets past the gatekeepers...
Things go bad...
Issue gets discovered & corrected....
Leader writes an honest and open note to explain the situation and actually apologizes.
Corporate America could learn something from this.
I used to assume that Linux had a huge test suite with hundreds of thousands of tests, given the crazy feature matrix that the kernel has to support. And that they would have started requiring tests for new features and bug fixes. Alas, that's not the case. There are a few external test suites like the Linux Test Project [1], but nothing that looks very extensive. The process seems to mostly rely on maintainers givin…
Comment rom "Helping Out with LTS Kernel Releases"[0]: "I find it amusing that the answer to "how can I help test" is "that people test the -rc releases when I announce them, and let me know if they work or not for their systems/workloads/tests/whatever". No smoke tests, no automated tools, no suggested workloads, no fuzzing, just "fool around and report back". There probably are lots of kernel testing tools around,…
It's just done individually, with each person hitting their own niche, and without a single all-powerful CI pipeline that's visible.
I'd find it interesting to read an analysis how this bug could have happened from a technical point. Like... is swap file support going shortcuts in the kernel so that it can corrupt the file system the swap file is residing on? Because (at least in my hope) no matter of write() or whatever calls on a file handle should cause a filesystem corruption...
The swap file code does not go through the filesystem. It's the exact same code which is used for a swap partition or a swap file, and it writes directly to the block device (the partition). The main difference is that, if you have a swap file, the "swapon" call asks the filesystem to tell it which ranges in the block device contain the swap, instead of using the whole block device.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So I'm not blaming the developers in question, Much kinder than past Linus writings. I loved it too. "Double ungood" works at least as good as the swearing.
I can recall a colleague, many years ago, sometimes using "doubleplusungood", often shortened -- in (typical lazy UNIX admin style -- to just ++ungood Later, another cow-orker tried using a slight variant ... ++!good ... although that one never really caught on -- apparently it didn't compile or something (maybe because we were using Red Hat's version "2.96" of gcc at the time?). -- (+10 Internet points if you get th…
typedef double winston;
winston smith(int good) { return (double)+!good; }Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer to why a partition is constant size: you are permanently reserving that amount of disk space, that's what a partition is. Swapfiles aren't dynamic for the same reason, but, you can have multiple swapfiles, and when they are empty, you can discard them. If you really want dynamic swap, you can run swapfiled, which will monitor memory usage and create and mount swapfiles of a given granularity on demand. If…
> If you have a matlab script that needs 1TB of swap, I don't know why you're running it here. Buy a server with a TB of RAM, or rent one. why would you assume that having a machine with 1TB of free space means that you have any way of spending money ?
A 1 TB swap sounds like it will thrash a disk to the point of failure pretty quickly and perform quite poorly compared to a system with more appropriate amounts of RAM.
Having to replace disks more frequently and have tasks take longer than an appropriately equipped system could potentially be the more expensive in the long run.
I used to assume that Linux had a huge test suite with hundreds of thousands of tests, given the crazy feature matrix that the kernel has to support. And that they would have started requiring tests for new features and bug fixes. Alas, that's not the case. There are a few external test suites like the Linux Test Project [1], but nothing that looks very extensive. The process seems to mostly rely on maintainers givin…
I used to assume that Linux had a huge test suite with hundreds of thousands of tests, given the crazy feature matrix that the kernel has to support. And that they would have started requiring tests for new features and bug fixes. Alas, that's not the case. There are a few external test suites like the Linux Test Project [1], but nothing that looks very extensive. The process seems to mostly rely on maintainers givin…
Comment rom "Helping Out with LTS Kernel Releases"[0]: "I find it amusing that the answer to "how can I help test" is "that people test the -rc releases when I announce them, and let me know if they work or not for their systems/workloads/tests/whatever". No smoke tests, no automated tools, no suggested workloads, no fuzzing, just "fool around and report back". There probably are lots of kernel testing tools around,…
Yes, it's a manual test, but it "does the job" (or 99% of it at least)
Why are swap files/partitions constant size? Most of the time, I don't need any swap at all, and any swap file/partition is wasted space. While hibernated, I need ~the amount of system ram as swap. While running some horrendous matlab script, I need about 1TB of swap. Yet linux won't dynamically allocate it like other files. I'm forced to constantly resize it manually to save space or be able to do more things.
Windows uses a single file by default (C:\pagefile.sys), while macOS allocates them in chunks (/private/var/vm/swapfile).
I used to assume that Linux had a huge test suite with hundreds of thousands of tests, given the crazy feature matrix that the kernel has to support. And that they would have started requiring tests for new features and bug fixes. Alas, that's not the case. There are a few external test suites like the Linux Test Project [1], but nothing that looks very extensive. The process seems to mostly rely on maintainers givin…
To be honest, many codebases that I've worked on with large automated test suites seemed to have approximately the same relative occurrence of bugs as codebases with zero automated tests.
Nice. Everywhere I've worked, once the fix has been committed the job is done. I should be more conscientious about preventing bad commits from being in branch histories like this.