hello, everyone,

I have developed a module and want to test it whether it is rubust or not, or want to see whether it works well with linux kernel or not. but I don't know how to test it.

I've run "crashme" which is a component of "ltp", but no useful messages showed up to me. so

Are there some good methods to test my modules and the kernel?
Thanks a lot indeed!

-dreams

One simple test is load and unload it in a loop, to find race conditions and other errors:

thank you very much, macemoneta.
your idea is great, and i've learn a lot from that

and do you have any ideas to have a stress test to kernel? except ltp of course.

i appreciated

The entire kernel? Even ltp, with almost 3000 test programs, only covers a small portion of the kernel instruction paths.

You need to define your testing requirements more stringently.

thank u for ur reply again, macemoneta
I'd like to test entire kernel, ltp only test it, but don't show more useful info, or messages to me. And the testcases of ltp are hardcoded, For example, it use vixie-cron, and to find "/etc/cron.d/cron.weekly" directory, but I use fcron, and there is not a "/etc/cron.d/cron.weekly" directory in my "/etc", so i should alter the source code, and so on.

Do you have any good suggestions for me ?
Thank you so much.

What particular area of the kernel are you attempting to test?

If it has to do with networking, you could whip up a random payload script to spam the machine with different protocols/payloads/etc... and observe for stability issues.

If it's disk io, you could always whip up a script to intentionally attempt to break permissions and do large numbers of heavy reads/writes (i.e. move a DVD image from partition to partition).

Or perhaps memory management issues?

Or threading?

There are a billion different routes to test (as macemoneta has stated previously)...so what kind of module are you testing?

Thanks rocket357,

As you said, I would like to test entire kernel, such as networking, disk io, threading, memory management and so on.

And I know LTP is a good tools to test all the aspests above, But, is there any aternative existed? In other words, LTP is not perfectly suit my system, or meet my needs.



- dreams

If you are going to use LTP, you need to configure your system for testing. In this case, you build a machine to suit the application, not the other way around. In fact, it's physically impossible to test the entire kernel on a single platform; you would need several dozen machines for each architecture, just for the hardware diversity to exercise different instruction paths.

You could re-write the tests that would have a problem with your configuration. If you are considering that, why not join the Linux Test Project, and contribute your changes back into the base?

I agree with macemoneta, you can probably find a test project out there somewhere that you can use as a starting point to test your system.

Are you a programmer? Just curious.

And again, as macemoneta stated, please contribute any improvements you make (even if you just modify a few test cases to suit your needs better)...it'll make the community stronger as a whole.

And, should you decide to create your own test framework, make it available so others can benefit from it as well. A common misconception about software is that it needs to be "polished" and "finished" when released...but in the open source world the exact opposite is typically the case (release early, release often). This allows others to examine your code and assist with ideas, design, patches, etc...and makes the project stronger that it would be otherwise.

Thanks both you guys , and thanks your suggestions

It's a pity that I'm not a programmer, but I had contributed a patch to LTP, but they don't applied.

I absolutely agree with what both you guys said, and I promise if I write a new program or make some advance improvements, I'll contribute it to upstream