Open Source Tech Conference 0

KernelCI: how patches grow up and go to school

This talk will give an overview of the open-source tools being created by the KernelCI project to help catch problems before they end up in the Linux kernel. Follow a patch from its toddler days on the mailing list through its “school-age” years of stress and testing in linux-next and mainline and its eventual “graduation” into a long-term stable (LTS) kernel. Throughout the lifecycle of a patch, there are many opportunities for testing, and we’ll discuss all the ways KernelCI is involved. There may even be stories of “grown-up” patches that need to go back to school.

We’ll cover the tooling used by KernelCI to build, boot and test the kernel, an overview of how a wide variety of hardware is used to validate the kernel, and how data is collected during each phase in order to provide reporting, analysis and visualization of results.

Kevin Hilman​ France. Nice Co-founder, Senior Engineer BayLibre​

Khouloud Touil​ France. Nice Embedded Software Engineer BayLibre​

Kevin has been a Linux user since 1994, and a kernel hacker since 1999 when he started writing drivers and working on kernel ports to new embedded platforms. He has been a driver/kernel developer for Equator Technologies, MontaVista, Texas Instruments, Linaro and currently a co-founder and Sr. engineer at BayLibre, an embedded Linux consultancy.

Kevin is also a maintainer for various parts of the upstream Linux kernel. He helps maintain the arm-soc tree, the Generic PM domains subsystem, the Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS) subsystem, Amlogic SoC support, TI Davinci SoC support, and the PM core infrastructure for TI SoCs. He is also an active reviewer of PM infrastructure for new SoCs and a key contributor to the KernelCI project.

Khouloud is a embedded software engineer working for BayLibre in France. She has worked on a variety of embedded Linux based products, including VR headsets, contributes to the CI and automated testing (CIAT) project of Automotive Grade Linux and is also active in the new KernelCI project in the Linux Foundation. As of v5.6, she has her first patch accepted in the mainline Linux Kernel.