A journey towards reliable testing in the Linux Kernel

Over the past year, we at Collabora have embarked on a journey to improve the Linux kernel integration for everyone. A key part of that work is enhancing the quality of tests by developing new upstream tests and refining automated testing processes.

A significant portion of testing in the Linux kernel remains manual or only minimally automated, with many subsystems still lacking automated test coverage. This raised some critical questions: How can we alleviate the maintainers' burden through continuous integration (CI) testing? How can we better support developers by detecting and reporting regressions?

Driven by these questions, we started an effort to make CI systems more trustworthy and actively engage the upstream community in the testing process. Ultimately, focusing on test quality is key: good tests lead to reliable reports, which are essential for a strong CI process.

Collabora has been heavily involved in KernelCI over the years, working on its infrastructure, creating new tests, and running a dedicated lab to run tests on specific hardware platforms for our clients. During this time, we found many issues related to the quality of the tests. Then, with the recent launch of the new KernelCI infrastructure, we saw a chance to make improvements and focus on the reliability of the tests.

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