Arjan van de Ven has a framework that supplies answers to "make config".
"make config" asks the questions one at a time; Arjan's script parses
each question and returns a random answer from the set of legal answers.
That's how mconfig "--mode random" works, too. I added some chrome so
that the user could supply the seed for the random number generator,
and also so that the seed is recorded in .config (whether it was
user-supplied or system-supplied).
Arjan found a lot of bugs such as: if feature X1 is modular, and feature
X2 is resident, the kernel won't link because feature X2 uses symbols
from feature X1. Sometimes these are fixable by fixing code; sometimes
they are fixable by adding more constraints. But however they are
fixed, they are bugs, and this is a good way to find them.
There are also bugs such as: feature X3 simply doesn't compile if it
is resident, feature X4 doesn't compile if it is modular.
During the 2.2 release freeze, Arjan found and fixed several dozen bugs
this way.
Given the speed that the kernel gets patched, it's actually easier to
build 1000 random configurations than it is to maintain a test suite
which covers all the possibilities.
In mconfig, I also wrote "--mode maximum" (say "yes" to everything) and
"--mode minimum" (say "no" to everything), just because it was easy.
I don't know if these are actually useful.
Michael
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