[Automated-testing] CKI hackfest @Plumbers invite

[Veronika Kabatova]

Hi,

as some of you have heard, CKI Project is planning hackfest CI meetings after
Plumbers conference this year (Sept. 12-13). We would like to invite everyone
who has interest in CI for kernel to come and join us.

The early agenda with summary is at the end of the email. If you think there's
something important missing let us know! Also let us know in case you'd want to
lead any of the sessions, we'd be happy to delegate out some work :)


Please send us an email as soon as you decide to come and feel free to invite
other people who should be present. We are not planning to cap the attendance
right now but need to solve the logistics based on the interest. The event is
free to attend, no additional registration except letting us know is needed.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions,
Veronika
CKI Project


-----------------------------------------------------------
Here is an early agenda we put together:
- Introductions
- Common place for upstream results, result publishing in general
  - The discussion on the mailing list is going strong so we might be able to
    substitute this session for a different one in case everything is solved by
    September.
- Test result interpretation and bug detection
  - How to autodetect infrastructure failures, regressions/new bugs and test
    bugs? How to handle continuous failures due to known bugs in both tests and
    kernel? What's your solution? Can people always trust the results they
    receive?
- Getting results to developers/maintainers
  - Aimed at kernel developers and maintainers, share your feedback and
    expectations.
  - How much data should be sent in the initial communication vs. a click away
    in a dashboard? Do you want incremental emails with new results as they come
    in?
  - What about adding checks to tested patches in Patchwork when patch series
    are being tested?
  - Providing enough data/script to reproduce the failure. What if special HW
    is needed?
- Onboarding new kernel trees to test
  - Aimed at kernel developers and maintainers.
  - Which trees are most prone to bring in new problems? Which are the most
    critical ones? Do you want them to be tested? Which tests do you feel are
    most beneficial for specific trees or in general?
- Security when testing untrusted patches
  - How do we merge, compile, and test patches that have untrusted code in them
    and have not yet been reviewed? How do we avoid abuse of systems,
    information theft, or other damage?
  - Check out the original patch that sparked the discussion at
    https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/862123/
- Avoiding effort duplication
  - Food for thought by GregKH
  - X different CI systems running ${TEST} on latest stable kernel on x86_64
    might look useless on the first look but is it? AMD/Intel CPUs, different
    network cards, different graphic drivers, compilers, kernel configuration...
    How do we distribute the workload to avoid doing the same thing all over
    again while still running in enough different environments to get the most
    coverage?
- Common hardware pools
  - Is this something people are interested in? Would be helpful especially for
    HW that's hard to access, eg. ppc64le or s390x systems. Companies could also
    sing up to share their HW for testing to ensure kernel works with their
    products.