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Comment by q-big | Hacker News Reader

> Although some kernel driver developers have testing clusters with real hardware (like GPU drivers devs), there is no effin way Linux could be effectively tested without someone paying a lot of money to set up real hardware and people to keep it running.

Just crowdsource this testing: I am sure that there exist some people who own the piece of hardware and are willing to run a test script, say, every

* night

* week

* new testing version of the kernel

(depending on your level of passion for the hardware and/or Linux). I do believe that there do exist a lot of people who would join such a crowdsourcing effort if the necessary infrastructure existed (i.e. it is very easy to run and submit the results).

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I think you are vastly overestimating the willingness and capability of volunteers and underestimating the effort needed to coordinate such an effort.

And having any kind of manual intervention required will almost certainly reduce the reliability of the testing.

This is further complicated by the need to reboot with a different kernel image. Qemu and virtual machines can't do all kinds of hw testing needed.

And in fact, the kernel is already tested like this. Just very irregularly and sporadically. The end users will do the field testing and it is surprisingly effective in finding bugs.

> I think you are vastly overestimating the willingness and capability of volunteers and underestimating the effort needed to coordinate such an effort.

> And having any kind of manual intervention required will almost certainly reduce the reliability of the testing.

Perhaps I am underestimating the necessary effort, but the willingness and capability problem can in my opinion be solved by sufficiently streamlining and documenting the processes of running the test procedure.

If the testing procedure cannot be successfully run by a "somewhat experienced Linux nerd", this should be considered a usability bug of the testing procedure (and thus be fixed).

I thought they already had clusters like this. Maybe I’m thinking of FreeBSD?

Dogfooding of builds is also testing, just a different kind.

The NixOS community would be perfect for this, since "nothing" (i wouldn't wanna do experimental filesystems) can break my system, I just atomicly roll back to my previous generation and report it broken :)

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