From: Eric Sandeen Subject: Re: [PATCH] ext4: memory leakage in ext4_mb_init() Date: Sun, 04 Apr 2010 23:27:26 -0500 Message-ID: <4BB966AE.1060207@redhat.com> References: <20100322012758.GE11560@thunk.org> <87sk7nv4sp.fsf@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <20100403165340.GA17819@thunk.org> <20100404180845.GG18524@thunk.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: tytso@mit.edu, "Aneesh Kumar K. V" , linux-ext4 , Andreas Dilger , Dave Kleikamp To: jing zhang Return-path: Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:5735 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750732Ab0DEE1g (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Apr 2010 00:27:36 -0400 In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: jing zhang wrote: > 2010/4/5, tytso@mit.edu : >> On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 09:05:14AM +0800, jing zhang wrote: >> >> How much testing are you doing before submitting patches, out of >> curiosity? > > Yes, Ted, it is curiosity that drives me to do hard works, including patch ext4. It is the language barrier that is making some of this difficult, but I'm not complaining - you speak English much better than I speak any second language. :) Ted meant that -he- was curious about how much testing you were doing. ... > And after operations on cmdline, I compile the modified, modprobe, dd, > and rmmod with virtual machine. It is not hard. More testing than this would be good; dd is very minimal. One of our new standard tests for et4 is the xfstests test suite from http://git.kernel.org/?p=fs/xfs/xfstests-dev.git;a=summary It is a collection of many tests developed for xfs, but many tests are generic and can run on ext4 as well. I would suggest that after you have several patches ready, you should at least run through the tests in this collection. It won't catch every mistake but it runs a large variety of tests, much more stressful than dd. Thanks for your email, and thanks for clearly spending time looking for ways to improve ext4. I think that with practice, you will be a good contributor. Ted can certainly be a patient maintainer - read his suggestions and the kernel patch submission guidelines, and I think you will get better at this. Do your best to explain the reasons for your patches, and any testing you have done, and describe any test which can show a bug that you find - and we can help to clarify changelogs if they need it. -Eric