Recent Siano patches - testing required

2009-05-19 Thread Steven Toth

Mauro please review.

Uri,

Firstly I'd like to thank you and Siano for patching and helping to maintain the 
driver. :)


Second, this is a heck of a lot of change for the list to review! It's 
impossible to digest the level of rework and potential regressions.


I'd suggest you either host your own mercurial server and have testers pull your 
trees, helping to regression test your changes or ... someone gives you access 
to create trees at LinuxTV.org, then you can solicit testers feedback on the 
mailing list.


Either way, it's unusual for this amount of change to be merged without having 
some positive feedback from the Linux community of testers. If you have 
confirmation that all of the current devices are still working correct, without 
regression, then please indicate this in your patches / email.


If not, the patches should be hosted somewhere for test and review.

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Re: Recent Siano patches - testing required

2009-05-19 Thread Uri Shkolnik



--- On Tue, 5/19/09, Steven Toth st...@kernellabs.com wrote:

 From: Steven Toth st...@kernellabs.com
 Subject: Recent Siano patches - testing required
 To: uri...@yahoo.com, Mauro Carvalho Chehab mche...@infradead.org
 Cc: linux-media@vger.kernel.org linux-media@vger.kernel.org
 Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2009, 10:15 PM
 Mauro please review.
 
 Uri,
 
 Firstly I'd like to thank you and Siano for patching and
 helping to maintain the driver. :)
 
 Second, this is a heck of a lot of change for the list to
 review! It's impossible to digest the level of rework and
 potential regressions.
 
 I'd suggest you either host your own mercurial server and
 have testers pull your trees, helping to regression test
 your changes or ... someone gives you access to create trees
 at LinuxTV.org, then you can solicit testers feedback on the
 mailing list.
 
 Either way, it's unusual for this amount of change to be
 merged without having some positive feedback from the Linux
 community of testers. If you have confirmation that all of
 the current devices are still working correct, without
 regression, then please indicate this in your patches /
 email.
 
 If not, the patches should be hosted somewhere for test and
 review.
 
 -- Steven Toth - Kernel Labs
 http://www.kernellabs.com
 


Steven,

Thanks for your comments.

Brief history about Siano's Linux kernel drivers...

First set of Siano's based receivers drivers has been introduced at the first 
half of 2008.

Since mid-2008 till about little more than a month ago, from various reasons, 
(most of these reasons were unrelated to Siano's intentions), there were no 
submissions to the LinuxTV mercurial.

However, lots of progress with Linux drivers has been achieved. Some of it 
within the Linux various communities (for example with the MMC maintainer, and 
members of this mailing list based on direct contacts) but primarily with 
Siano's commercial customers which based their products on Linux OS or it 
derivatives (such as Google's Android). 

Note that the recent month' patches came to bring the LinuxTV mercurial (and 
kernel's git as a result) up to the state of Siano's internal Subversion 
repository. Meaning, the patches are not new code / new bugs fixes etc. but 
rather up-stream from Siano's repository to LinuxTV's (same as it done from 
each sub-kernel system (including LinuxTV) to the kernel git).

The Siano's drivers have been tested thoroughly, both in Siano's QA departments 
(where a full time QA engineer is tasked to test various Linux/SMS based 
setups) and in customers sites as well.

Note that the current Siano's Linux drivers set is been used by many dozens of 
commercial products (including tear-1 companies' products), which of course 
have been tested thoroughly that offering, and it is a production level code 
(literally).

The risks as I see them with all those patches, are that some work (minor) has 
been done in order to make these patches appropriate to be submitted (per all 
rules of patches submission to LinuxTV / Linux kernel). 

Another problem is that I find it hard to believe that there will be many 
testers available from this mailing list. True that there are some dongle and 
mini-cards based on Siano's chip-set which these devices' manufacturers 
representatives are on this list, orsome people may own these, but the vast 
majority of Siano's based products are embedded based devices (including 
multiple tablet/UMPC PCs, cellular phones, PDAs, navigation devices, DVD/BR 
players, gaming devices and many others), so unless someone will hack those 
devices and will replace the installed drivers (kernel image actually, since 
most of these fixed-targets developers build the Siano's modules to be included 
within the kernel image) there is no much hope for comprehensive oopen 
testers test.

However any test that will be performed, will benefit all (including Siano 
:-)

It's true that is the recent past, Siano equipped some volunteers from this 
community with devices (free of charge), but it had been done base on Siano's 
selfish objectives, which at the time suited various individuals.
I find it hard to believe that Siano will equip anyone just for random 
testing, since we have enough brimful testing environments.


Best Regards,

Uri

 


  
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Re: Recent Siano patches - testing required

2009-05-19 Thread Steven Toth

However any test that will be performed, will benefit all (including Siano 
:-)



Agreed. Yes, I happen to know Hauppauge very well.

I'm very happy to see that the driver is being improved but I'll be even happier 
to see actual testers report success before any of this stuff is merged. My 
concern is the vast amount of change coming through this list and expected to be 
merged blindly into the kernel.


If we have no testers then, at least for Hauppauge products, we'll find some. 
Let me know if I can help with this.


Until then nothing should be blindly merged that could regress existing product 
support.


Mauro?

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Re: Recent Siano patches - testing required

2009-05-19 Thread Mauro Carvalho Chehab
Em Tue, 19 May 2009 17:30:42 -0400
Steven Toth st...@kernellabs.com escreveu:

  However any test that will be performed, will benefit all (including 
  Siano :-)
  
 
 Agreed. Yes, I happen to know Hauppauge very well.
 
 I'm very happy to see that the driver is being improved but I'll be even 
 happier 
 to see actual testers report success before any of this stuff is merged. My 
 concern is the vast amount of change coming through this list and expected to 
 be 
 merged blindly into the kernel.
 
 If we have no testers then, at least for Hauppauge products, we'll find some. 
 Let me know if I can help with this.
 
 Until then nothing should be blindly merged that could regress existing 
 product 
 support.
 
 Mauro?

Steven,

Your concerns about testing make sense, but this were already tried in the
past, when Uri started sending their patches at the ML. So, instead of
repeating the same novel, let's merge the patches at the development tree and
ask people to test.

Yet, I'm keeping the Siano patches at the 'pending' -git tree, where I hold
very experimental work. I intend to hold it there until we have more tests and
have all the pending patches merged.

About creating an -hg tree for Siano (and for other developers), I had to nack
it in the past, since the LinuxTV server were overloaded. Now that the machine
got replaced, I think we may actually create a tree for them. 

Uri, please discuss about this in priv with me, in order to exchange the needed
information for the login account.



Cheers,
Mauro
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Re: Recent Siano patches - testing required

2009-05-19 Thread Steven Toth

Uri, please discuss about this in priv with me, in order to exchange the needed
information for the login account.


Thank you Mauro.

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http://www.kernellabs.com
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Re: Recent Siano patches - testing required

2009-05-19 Thread Mauro Carvalho Chehab
Em Tue, 19 May 2009 22:05:19 -0400
Devin Heitmueller dheitmuel...@kernellabs.com escreveu:

 It's not clear to me why you are putting this code that is untested by
 the community into the v4l-dvb tree.  In all other cases where linuxtv
 developers want to submit large sets of changes, you expect them to
 create a private tree so testers can be solicited *before* it goes
 into v4l-dvb.  Why would this case be any different?

Because it was the way we've indicated to Uri for submitting his patches:

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-media@vger.kernel.org/msg00473.html

We may change it for the next patch series, but I'll pick the good patches from
this series via patchwork.

Cheers,
Mauro

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