Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932368AbVIEIph (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Sep 2005 04:45:37 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932371AbVIEIph (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Sep 2005 04:45:37 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:28097 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932368AbVIEIpf (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Sep 2005 04:45:35 -0400 Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2005 01:45:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Rolf Eike Beer cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List , Helge Hafting , Dave Airlie , Benjamin Herrenschmidt , Michael Ellerman , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Andrew Morton Subject: Re: rc5 seemed to kill a disk that rc4-mm1 likes. Also some X trouble. In-Reply-To: <200509050949.38842@bilbo.math.uni-mannheim.de> Message-ID: References: <200508301007.11554@bilbo.math.uni-mannheim.de> <200509050949.38842@bilbo.math.uni-mannheim.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2214 Lines: 54 On Mon, 5 Sep 2005, Rolf Eike Beer wrote: > > The problem appeared between 2.6.12-git3 and 2.6.12-git4. Just for reference, that's git ID's 1d345dac1f30af1cd9f3a1faa12f9f18f17f236e..2a5a68b840cbab31baab2d9b2e1e6de3b289ae1e and that's 225 commits and the diff is 55,781 lines long. It would be very good if you could try to use raw git and narrow it down a bit more. It's really easy these days with a recent git version, just do git bisect start git bisect good 1d345dac1f30af1cd9f3a1faa12f9f18f17f236e git bisect bad 2a5a68b840cbab31baab2d9b2e1e6de3b289ae1e and off you go.. That will select a new kernel for you to try, which basically cuts down the commits to ~110 - and if you can test just a few kernels and binary-search a bit more, we'd have it down to just a couple. If you want to try work smarter (rather than a brute-force binary search thing), this command line: git-whatchanged -p \ 1d345dac1f30af1cd9f3a1faa12f9f18f17f236e..2a5a68b840cbab31baab2d9b2e1e6de3b289ae1e \ drivers/video will actually give you some very good information on what to try (I forget your exact original problem - I'm writing this from Italy, and I don't have my full email archives here. It was some MGA card that stopped working, no? Or was there something else?). Anyway, git users really have a lot of nifty tools to help chase down bugs like this. I used that "git bisect" thing twice myself last week. And the "git-whatchanged" thing really is pretty flexible: as you can see, you can limit it to both a range of commits and a certain subdirectory (or a _set_ of subdirectories and/or individual files - you can have as many pathname limits as you want). And that "-p" thing makes it show the whole diff for the thing (replace if with a "-s" if you just want to see the descriptions and be silent about the actual diff). All in my never-ending quest to make people more aware of how they can use git to pinpoint the source of kernel bugs. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/