Does anybody know what's the Linux testing regime is at Novell? What investments do they make on Linux kernel testing?

I'm sure someone will point you to Novell's QA process, somewhere on their web site, but I wanted to make a general comment.

While every one of the 350 or so Linux distributions goes through some level of quality assurance, remember that many of them use common components like the Linux kernel you are asking about. Almost all distributions feed bug reports to the kernel developers from their own problem tracking systems.

In other words the Novell kernel process, no matter how extensive or shallow it is, also benefits from the efforts of Fedora Core, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, ...

The Linux development process is very different than the development process for a product that comes from a single vendor. It can be difficult to comprehend the actual enormity of having millions of developers.

Apparently the benefit of having so many debug everything didn't help them with the quality of that part which is uniquely their's.