On 07-02-2014 11:10:59, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Fri, 07 Feb 2014 16:31:04 +0100, Matthias Beyer said:
I'm currently working on some stylefix-patches for drivers/cdrom/cdrom.c and I'm slowly getting to a point where they seem to be ready. How to test my patches?
Note that some maintainers don't like accepting style fix patches, because they are of the opinion that there's 2 basic cases.
The first is that somebody else is doing active work on the driver, and this causes merge conflicts when your patches and theirs collide.
The second is where the code is already stable, and you hit this:
I know I should compile them at least, to be sure they build. But how can I test if the code (still) works (the way it is expected to)?
Yes, it's possible you break some stable code this way. So the maintainer may not want them unless you're doing it as preparation for actual work on the driver...
That's true. But how can I get my feet wet _without_ running into the issue of possibly breaking something? Of course, with testing and all the stuff... but I'm still a newbie working on running code! I cannot create a new driver from scratch, as I do not have the capabilities!
The problem is that whether it's VirtualBox, KVM, or Xen, you're testing against a virtualized device, not real hardware. This isn't as big an issue if you're doing filesystem work, or the memory manager or scheduler, but can be a problem if you're testing a hardware driver...
So you would say, I should start patching non-hardware driver code, FS for example, to get my feet wet with the kernel? -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Kind regards, Matthias Beyer Proudly sent with mutt. Happily signed with gnupg.