Yes, I agree that _this_ issue could have been found. But the parent was talking more in general of "doesn't the kernel have a test suite", and both hardware-dependent (drivers, profiling, virtualization, etc.) and hardware-independent (filesystem, networking, etc.) aspects of the kernel are distributed across multiple testsuites.
The stable kernels pre-release queue is posted periodically to the mailing list and subsystem maintainers _could_ run it through their tests, but honestly I don't believe that many do. Personally I prefer to err on the other side; unless something was explicitly chosen for stable kernel inclusion and applies perfectly, I ask the stable kernel maintainers to not bother include the commit. This approach also has disadvantages of course, so they still run their machine learning thingy and I approve/reject each commit that the bot flags for inclusion.
The stable kernels pre-release queue is posted periodically to the mailing list and subsystem maintainers _could_ run it through their tests, but honestly I don't believe that many do. Personally I prefer to err on the other side; unless something was explicitly chosen for stable kernel inclusion and applies perfectly, I ask the stable kernel maintainers to not bother include the commit. This approach also has disadvantages of course, so they still run their machine learning thingy and I approve/reject each commit that the bot flags for inclusion.
> BTW is that bonzini of GNU Smalltalk fame?
Yes it's me. :) Did we meet?