The KernelCI team invites developers and companies to participate. Dates are being discussed for the next hackfest to happen around the end of August, a few weeks before the Linux Plumbers Conference. More hackfests will come in the future – this was only the first one.
We’ve achieved a lot in such a short time, in spite of a few workflow weaknesses which we’re now addressing to help further grow the KernelCI community with new developers.” said Guillaume Tucker, KernelCI project lead and Senior Software Engineer at Collabora. On top of that, there was an accomplishment for many test cases and test suites, as detailed above. Kernel testing through product-specific userspace opens a whole new avenue of possibilities for KernelCI.
The overall results were significant for only a few days of work.
It is still quite experimental, but the support will evolve over the next few months, opening the path for other product-specific userspaces. The support for the Chromium OS userspace is the start of full-stack tests in KernelCI. These types of tests stress the kernel in unique ways, exposing problems that might otherwise go unnoticed from release to release. Then, as soon as the video call is up, many other measurements can be made: camera capture latency, camera stream to network latency, memory consumption, power consumption, GPU performance, background tasks latency, and user interaction latency. Once the user starts a video call, the test can begin by measuring the time needed to set up the video feed and show it in the browser rendered with the rest of the video call website. Generally, it is not simple for lower-level kernel test suites like kselftests or LTP to orchestrate a similar use case.Ĭonsider video call simulation for example. They allow a more thorough kernel testing and validation through real application use cases, which can exercise several different kernel areas at the same time in an organized manner. However, the benefits are a clear win for the community.
Enabling full userspace images and real-world tests like video call simulations adds a lot of complexity to the testing process. It kicked off the work to enable kernel testing through Chromium OS, a product-specific userspace. The first-ever KernelCI hackfest was a success. Through this effort, the KernelCI team also expects to increase awareness for continuous kernel testing and validation – more hackfests will happen in the future, so stay tuned if you want to join. It aimed at bringing developers and companies together to improve testing for areas of the Linux kernel they care about. The hackfest was a community event promoted by the KernelCI team. For a total of seven days, developers from the KernelCI team, Google, and Collabora worked to improve many different aspects of KernelCI testing capabilities. The first KernelCI test development and coverage hackfest took place from 27 th May to 4 th June 2021.