On 24.10.25 17:51, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
Hi David,
Hi,
On Fri, 2025-10-24 at 17:47 +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
Please have people test kernel changes on SPARC on real hardware. QEMU does not
emulate sun4v, for example, and therefore testing in QEMU does not cover all
of SPARC hardware.
There are plenty of people on the debian-sparc, gentoo-sparc and sparclinux
LKML mailing lists that can test kernel patches for SPARC. If SPARC-relevant
changes need to be tested, please ask there and don't bury such things in a
deeply nested thread in a discussion which doesn't even have SPARC in the
mail subject.
out of curiosity, do people monitor sparclinux@ for changes to actively
offer testing when required -- like would it be sufficient to CC
relevant maintainers+list (like done here) and raise in the cover letter
that some testing help would be appreciated?
Yes, that's definitely the case. But it should be obvious that from the subject
of the mail that the change affects SPARC as not everyone can read every mail
they're receiving through mailing lists.
Agreed. One would hope that people only CC the sparc mailing list +
maintainers when there is actually something relevant in there.
Also, it would be nice if someone (e.g., the maintainer or reviewers)
could monitor the list to spot that there is testing demand to CC the
right people.
I guess one problem might be that nobody is getting paid to work on
sparc I guess (I'm happy to be wrong on that one :) ).
Regarding sparc, I'll keep in mind that we might have to write a
separate mail to the list to get some help with testing.
I'm trying to keep up, but since I'm on mailing lists for many different
architectures,
mails can slip through the cracks.
Yeah, that's understandable.
For people that want to test changes on SPARC regularly, I can also offer
accounts
on SPARC test machines running on a Solaris LDOM (logical domain) on a SPARC T4.
For example, I do have a s390x machine in an IBM cloud where I can test
stuff. But I worked on s390x before, so I know how to test and what to
test, and how to troubleshoot.
On sparc I'd unfortunately have a hard time even understanding whether a
simple boot test on some machine will actually trigger what I wanted to
test :(
--
Cheers
David / dhildenb
