5.2.6-stable review

From: Takashi Iwai <[email protected]>

commit 801ebf1043ae7b182588554cc9b9ad3c14bc2ab5 upstream.

The recent USB core code performs sanity checks for the given pipe and EP types, and it can be hit by manipulated USB descriptors by syzbot. For making syzbot happier, this patch introduces a local helper for a sanity check in the driver side and calls it at each place before the message handling, so that we can avoid the WARNING splats.

Reported-by [email protected]

Signed-off-by Takashi Iwai <[email protected]>

Signed-off-by Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

Quoted 10 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

From: Takashi Iwai <[email protected]>

commit 801ebf1043ae7b182588554cc9b9ad3c14bc2ab5 upstream.

The recent USB core code performs sanity checks for the given pipe and EP types, and it can be hit by manipulated USB descriptors by syzbot. For making syzbot happier, this patch introduces a local helper for a sanity check in the driver side and calls it at each place before the message handling, so that we can avoid the WARNING splats.

Quoted 3 lines

Reported-by [email protected]

Signed-off-by Takashi Iwai <[email protected]>

Signed-off-by Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

This commit has a fix: 5d78e1c2b7f4b ("ALSA: usb-audio: Fix gpf in snd_usb_pipe_sanity_check") which was not pulled by Linus yet.

I'm going to drop this commit and re-queue it together with it's fix once it makes it upstream.

Quoted 15 lines · Sasha Levin

Quoted 13 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

From: Takashi Iwai <[email protected]>

commit 801ebf1043ae7b182588554cc9b9ad3c14bc2ab5 upstream.

The recent USB core code performs sanity checks for the given pipe and EP types, and it can be hit by manipulated USB descriptors by syzbot. For making syzbot happier, this patch introduces a local helper for a sanity check in the driver side and calls it at each place before the message handling, so that we can avoid the WARNING splats.

Reported-by [email protected]

Signed-off-by Takashi Iwai <[email protected]>

Signed-off-by Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

Quoted 5 lines

This commit has a fix: 5d78e1c2b7f4b ("ALSA: usb-audio: Fix gpf in snd_usb_pipe_sanity_check") which was not pulled by Linus yet.

I'm going to drop this commit and re-queue it together with it's fix once it makes it upstream.

Ah, thanks for doing that.

From: Luke Nowakowski-Krijger <[email protected]>

commit c666355e60ddb4748ead3bdd983e3f7f2224aaf0 upstream.

Change devm_k*alloc to k*alloc to manually allocate memory

The manual allocation and freeing of memory is necessary because when the USB radio is disconnected, the memory associated with devm_k*alloc is freed. Meaning if we still have unresolved references to the radio device, then we get use-after-free errors.

This patch fixes this by manually allocating memory, and freeing it in the v4l2.release callback that gets called when the last radio device exits.

Reported-and-tested-by [email protected]

Signed-off-by Luke Nowakowski-Krijger <[email protected]>

Signed-off-by Hans Verkuil <[email protected]>

[[email protected]: cleaned up two small checkpatch.pl warnings]

[[email protected]: prefix subject with driver name]

Signed-off-by Mauro Carvalho Chehab <[email protected]>

Signed-off-by Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

---
 drivers/media/radio/radio-raremono.c |   30 +++++++++++++++++++++++-------
 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)

drivers/media/radio/radio-raremono.c +23 -7

@@ -271,6 +271,14 @@ static int vidioc_g_frequency(struct fil
 	return 0;
 }
 
+static void raremono_device_release(struct v4l2_device *v4l2_dev)
+{
+	struct raremono_device *radio = to_raremono_dev(v4l2_dev);
+
+	kfree(radio->buffer);
+	kfree(radio);
+}
+
 /* File system interface */
 static const struct v4l2_file_operations usb_raremono_fops = {
 	.owner		= THIS_MODULE,

@@ -295,12 +303,14 @@ static int usb_raremono_probe(struct usb
 	struct raremono_device *radio;
 	int retval = 0;
 
-	radio = devm_kzalloc(&intf->dev, sizeof(struct raremono_device), GFP_KERNEL);
-	if (radio)
-		radio->buffer = devm_kmalloc(&intf->dev, BUFFER_LENGTH, GFP_KERNEL);
-
-	if (!radio || !radio->buffer)
+	radio = kzalloc(sizeof(*radio), GFP_KERNEL);
+	if (!radio)
+		return -ENOMEM;
+	radio->buffer = kmalloc(BUFFER_LENGTH, GFP_KERNEL);
+	if (!radio->buffer) {
+		kfree(radio);
 		return -ENOMEM;
+	}
 
 	radio->usbdev = interface_to_usbdev(intf);
 	radio->intf = intf;

@@ -324,7 +334,8 @@ static int usb_raremono_probe(struct usb
 	if (retval != 3 ||
 	    (get_unaligned_be16(&radio->buffer[1]) & 0xfff) == 0x0242) {
 		dev_info(&intf->dev, "this is not Thanko's Raremono.\n");
-		return -ENODEV;
+		retval = -ENODEV;
+		goto free_mem;
 	}
 
 	dev_info(&intf->dev, "Thanko's Raremono connected: (%04X:%04X)\n",

@@ -333,7 +344,7 @@ static int usb_raremono_probe(struct usb
 	retval = v4l2_device_register(&intf->dev, &radio->v4l2_dev);
 	if (retval < 0) {
 		dev_err(&intf->dev, "couldn't register v4l2_device\n");
-		return retval;
+		goto free_mem;
 	}
 
 	mutex_init(&radio->lock);

@@ -345,6 +356,7 @@ static int usb_raremono_probe(struct usb
 	radio->vdev.ioctl_ops = &usb_raremono_ioctl_ops;
 	radio->vdev.lock = &radio->lock;
 	radio->vdev.release = video_device_release_empty;
+	radio->v4l2_dev.release = raremono_device_release;
 
 	usb_set_intfdata(intf, &radio->v4l2_dev);
 

@@ -360,6 +372,10 @@ static int usb_raremono_probe(struct usb
 	}
 	dev_err(&intf->dev, "could not register video device\n");
 	v4l2_device_unregister(&radio->v4l2_dev);
+
+free_mem:
+	kfree(radio->buffer);
+	kfree(radio);
 	return retval;
 }
 

Quoted 11 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

From: Luke Nowakowski-Krijger <[email protected]>

commit c666355e60ddb4748ead3bdd983e3f7f2224aaf0 upstream.

Change devm_k*alloc to k*alloc to manually allocate memory

The manual allocation and freeing of memory is necessary because when the USB radio is disconnected, the memory associated with devm_k*alloc is freed. Meaning if we still have unresolved references to the radio device, then we get use-after-free errors.

Quoted 3 lines

This patch fixes this by manually allocating memory, and freeing it in the v4l2.release callback that gets called when the last radio device exits.

This really should be commented in the code and not just in the commit changelog as some unsuspecting person will likely undo this in the future without one.

This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.2.6 release. There are 20 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.

Responses should be made by Sun 04 Aug 2019 09:19:34 AM UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

The whole patch series can be found in one patch at:

	https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/stable-review/patch-5.2.6-rc1.gz

or in the git tree and branch at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git linux-5.2.y
and the diffstat can be found below.

thanks,

greg k-h

From: Thierry Reding <[email protected]>

Quoted 9 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.2.6 release. There are 20 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.

Responses should be made by Sun 04 Aug 2019 09:19:34 AM UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

The whole patch series can be found in one patch at:

Quoted 8 lines

	https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/stable-review/patch-5.2.6-rc1.gz

or in the git tree and branch at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git linux-5.2.y
and the diffstat can be found below.

thanks,

greg k-h

All tests passing for Tegra ...

Test results for stable-v5.2:

    12 builds:	12 pass, 0 fail
    22 boots:	22 pass, 0 fail
    38 tests:	38 pass, 0 fail

Linux version: 5.2.6-rc1-gbe893953fcc2
Boards tested: tegra124-jetson-tk1, tegra186-p2771-0000,

                tegra194-p2972-0000, tegra20-ventana,
                tegra210-p2371-2180, tegra30-cardhu-a04

Quoted 28 lines · Thierry Reding

From: Thierry Reding <[email protected]>

Quoted 9 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.2.6 release. There are 20 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.

Responses should be made by Sun 04 Aug 2019 09:19:34 AM UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

The whole patch series can be found in one patch at:

Quoted 8 lines

	https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/stable-review/patch-5.2.6-rc1.gz

or in the git tree and branch at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git linux-5.2.y
and the diffstat can be found below.

thanks,

greg k-h

All tests passing for Tegra ...

Test results for stable-v5.2:

    12 builds:	12 pass, 0 fail
    22 boots:	22 pass, 0 fail
    38 tests:	38 pass, 0 fail

Quoted 4 lines

Linux version: 5.2.6-rc1-gbe893953fcc2
Boards tested: tegra124-jetson-tk1, tegra186-p2771-0000,

                tegra194-p2972-0000, tegra20-ventana,
                tegra210-p2371-2180, tegra30-cardhu-a04

Great! Thanks for testing all of these and letting me know.

Hi Greg,

I stumbled across something as I was attempting to automate more parts of our process to generate these reports. The original test results were from a different version of the tree: 5.2.6-rc1-gdbc7f5c7df28. I suspect that's the same thing that you were discussing with Pavel regarding the IP tunnel patch that was added subsequent to the announcement.

Just for my understanding, does this mean that the patch still makes it into the 5.2.6 release, or was it supposed to go into 5.2.7?

One problem that I ran into was that when I tried to correlate the test results with your announcement email, there's no indication other than the branch name and the release candidate name (5.2.6-rc1 in this case), so there's no way to uniquely identify which test run belongs to the announcement. Given that there are no tags for the release candidates means that that's also not an option to uniquely associate with the builds and tests.

While the differences between the two builds are very minor here, I wonder if there could perhaps in the future be a problem where I report successful results for a test, but the same tests would be broken by a patch added to the stable-rc branch subsequent to the announcement. The test report would be misleading in that case.

I noticed that you do add a couple of X-KernelTest-* headers to your announcement emails, so I'm wondering if perhaps it was possible for you to add another one that contains the exact SHA1 that corresponds to the snapshot that's the release candidate. That would allow everyone to uniquely associate test results with a specific release candidate.

That said, perhaps I've just got this all wrong and there's already a way to connect all the dots that I'm not aware of. Or maybe I'm being too pedantic here?

Quoted 1 line · Thierry Reding

Hi Greg,

Sorry for the delay, this got pushed down my queue...

Quoted 29 lines

I stumbled across something as I was attempting to automate more parts of our process to generate these reports. The original test results were from a different version of the tree: 5.2.6-rc1-gdbc7f5c7df28. I suspect that's the same thing that you were discussing with Pavel regarding the IP tunnel patch that was added subsequent to the announcement.

Just for my understanding, does this mean that the patch still makes it into the 5.2.6 release, or was it supposed to go into 5.2.7?

One problem that I ran into was that when I tried to correlate the test results with your announcement email, there's no indication other than the branch name and the release candidate name (5.2.6-rc1 in this case), so there's no way to uniquely identify which test run belongs to the announcement. Given that there are no tags for the release candidates means that that's also not an option to uniquely associate with the builds and tests.

While the differences between the two builds are very minor here, I wonder if there could perhaps in the future be a problem where I report successful results for a test, but the same tests would be broken by a patch added to the stable-rc branch subsequent to the announcement. The test report would be misleading in that case.

I noticed that you do add a couple of X-KernelTest-* headers to your announcement emails, so I'm wondering if perhaps it was possible for you to add another one that contains the exact SHA1 that corresponds to the snapshot that's the release candidate. That would allow everyone to uniquely associate test results with a specific release candidate.

Quoted 3 lines

That said, perhaps I've just got this all wrong and there's already a way to connect all the dots that I'm not aware of. Or maybe I'm being too pedantic here?

You aren't being pedantic, I think you are missing exactly what the linux-stable-rc tree is for and how it is created.

Granted, it's not really documented anywhere so it's not your fault :)

The linux-stable-rc tree is there ONLY for people who want to test the -rc kernels and can not, or do not want to, use the quilt tree of patches in the stable-queue.git tree on kernel.org. I generate the branches there from a script that throws away the current -rc branch and rebuilds it "from scratch" by applying the patches that are in the stable-quilt tree and then adds the -rc patch as well. This tree is generated multiple times when I am working on the queues and then when I want to do a "real" -rc release.

The branches are constantly rebased, so you can not rely on 'git pull' doing the right thing (unless you add --rebase to it), and are there for testing only.

Yes, you will see different results of a "-rc1" release in the tree depending on the time of day/week when I created the tree, and sometimes I generate them multiple times a day just to have some of the auto-builders give me results quickly (Linaro does pull from it and sends me results within the hour usually).

So does that help? Ideally everyone would just use the quilt trees from stable-queue.git, but no everyone likes that, so the -rc git tree is there to make automated testing "easier". If that works with your workflow, wonderful, feel free to use it. If not, then go with the stable-quilt.git tree, or the tarballs on kernel.org.

And as for the SHA1 being in the emails, that doesn't make all that much sense as that SHA1 doesn't live very long. When I create the trees locally, I instantly delete them after pushing them to kernel.org so I can't regenerate them or do anything with them.

DOes that help explain things better?

Quoted 62 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

Quoted 1 line · Thierry Reding

Hi Greg,

Sorry for the delay, this got pushed down my queue...

Quoted 29 lines

I stumbled across something as I was attempting to automate more parts of our process to generate these reports. The original test results were from a different version of the tree: 5.2.6-rc1-gdbc7f5c7df28. I suspect that's the same thing that you were discussing with Pavel regarding the IP tunnel patch that was added subsequent to the announcement.

Just for my understanding, does this mean that the patch still makes it into the 5.2.6 release, or was it supposed to go into 5.2.7?

One problem that I ran into was that when I tried to correlate the test results with your announcement email, there's no indication other than the branch name and the release candidate name (5.2.6-rc1 in this case), so there's no way to uniquely identify which test run belongs to the announcement. Given that there are no tags for the release candidates means that that's also not an option to uniquely associate with the builds and tests.

While the differences between the two builds are very minor here, I wonder if there could perhaps in the future be a problem where I report successful results for a test, but the same tests would be broken by a patch added to the stable-rc branch subsequent to the announcement. The test report would be misleading in that case.

I noticed that you do add a couple of X-KernelTest-* headers to your announcement emails, so I'm wondering if perhaps it was possible for you to add another one that contains the exact SHA1 that corresponds to the snapshot that's the release candidate. That would allow everyone to uniquely associate test results with a specific release candidate.

Quoted 3 lines

That said, perhaps I've just got this all wrong and there's already a way to connect all the dots that I'm not aware of. Or maybe I'm being too pedantic here?

You aren't being pedantic, I think you are missing exactly what the linux-stable-rc tree is for and how it is created.

Granted, it's not really documented anywhere so it's not your fault :)

The linux-stable-rc tree is there ONLY for people who want to test the -rc kernels and can not, or do not want to, use the quilt tree of patches in the stable-queue.git tree on kernel.org. I generate the branches there from a script that throws away the current -rc branch and rebuilds it "from scratch" by applying the patches that are in the stable-quilt tree and then adds the -rc patch as well. This tree is generated multiple times when I am working on the queues and then when I want to do a "real" -rc release.

The branches are constantly rebased, so you can not rely on 'git pull' doing the right thing (unless you add --rebase to it), and are there for testing only.

Yes, you will see different results of a "-rc1" release in the tree depending on the time of day/week when I created the tree, and sometimes I generate them multiple times a day just to have some of the auto-builders give me results quickly (Linaro does pull from it and sends me results within the hour usually).

Quoted 5 lines

So does that help? Ideally everyone would just use the quilt trees from stable-queue.git, but no everyone likes that, so the -rc git tree is there to make automated testing "easier". If that works with your workflow, wonderful, feel free to use it. If not, then go with the stable-quilt.git tree, or the tarballs on kernel.org.

I'll have to look into that, to see if that'd work. I have to admit that having a git tree to point scripts at is rather convenient for automation.

Quoted 4 lines

And as for the SHA1 being in the emails, that doesn't make all that much sense as that SHA1 doesn't live very long. When I create the trees locally, I instantly delete them after pushing them to kernel.org so I can't regenerate them or do anything with them.

Fair enough. I suppose the worst thing that could happen is that we may fail to test a couple of commits occasionally. In the rare case where this actually matters we'll likely end up reporting the failure for the stable release, in which case it can be fixed in the next one.

Quoted 1 line

DOes that help explain things better?

Yes, makes a lot more sense now. Thanks for taking the time to explain it. Do you want me to snapshot this and submit it as documentation somewhere for later reference?

Quoted 85 lines · Thierry Reding

Quoted 62 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

Quoted 1 line · Thierry Reding

Hi Greg,

Sorry for the delay, this got pushed down my queue...

Quoted 29 lines

I stumbled across something as I was attempting to automate more parts of our process to generate these reports. The original test results were from a different version of the tree: 5.2.6-rc1-gdbc7f5c7df28. I suspect that's the same thing that you were discussing with Pavel regarding the IP tunnel patch that was added subsequent to the announcement.

Just for my understanding, does this mean that the patch still makes it into the 5.2.6 release, or was it supposed to go into 5.2.7?

One problem that I ran into was that when I tried to correlate the test results with your announcement email, there's no indication other than the branch name and the release candidate name (5.2.6-rc1 in this case), so there's no way to uniquely identify which test run belongs to the announcement. Given that there are no tags for the release candidates means that that's also not an option to uniquely associate with the builds and tests.

While the differences between the two builds are very minor here, I wonder if there could perhaps in the future be a problem where I report successful results for a test, but the same tests would be broken by a patch added to the stable-rc branch subsequent to the announcement. The test report would be misleading in that case.

I noticed that you do add a couple of X-KernelTest-* headers to your announcement emails, so I'm wondering if perhaps it was possible for you to add another one that contains the exact SHA1 that corresponds to the snapshot that's the release candidate. That would allow everyone to uniquely associate test results with a specific release candidate.

Quoted 3 lines

That said, perhaps I've just got this all wrong and there's already a way to connect all the dots that I'm not aware of. Or maybe I'm being too pedantic here?

You aren't being pedantic, I think you are missing exactly what the linux-stable-rc tree is for and how it is created.

Granted, it's not really documented anywhere so it's not your fault :)

The linux-stable-rc tree is there ONLY for people who want to test the -rc kernels and can not, or do not want to, use the quilt tree of patches in the stable-queue.git tree on kernel.org. I generate the branches there from a script that throws away the current -rc branch and rebuilds it "from scratch" by applying the patches that are in the stable-quilt tree and then adds the -rc patch as well. This tree is generated multiple times when I am working on the queues and then when I want to do a "real" -rc release.

The branches are constantly rebased, so you can not rely on 'git pull' doing the right thing (unless you add --rebase to it), and are there for testing only.

Yes, you will see different results of a "-rc1" release in the tree depending on the time of day/week when I created the tree, and sometimes I generate them multiple times a day just to have some of the auto-builders give me results quickly (Linaro does pull from it and sends me results within the hour usually).

Quoted 5 lines

So does that help? Ideally everyone would just use the quilt trees from stable-queue.git, but no everyone likes that, so the -rc git tree is there to make automated testing "easier". If that works with your workflow, wonderful, feel free to use it. If not, then go with the stable-quilt.git tree, or the tarballs on kernel.org.

I'll have to look into that, to see if that'd work. I have to admit that having a git tree to point scripts at is rather convenient for automation.

Quoted 4 lines

And as for the SHA1 being in the emails, that doesn't make all that much sense as that SHA1 doesn't live very long. When I create the trees locally, I instantly delete them after pushing them to kernel.org so I can't regenerate them or do anything with them.

Fair enough. I suppose the worst thing that could happen is that we may fail to test a couple of commits occasionally. In the rare case where this actually matters we'll likely end up reporting the failure for the stable release, in which case it can be fixed in the next one.

Quoted 1 line

DOes that help explain things better?

Quoted 3 lines

Yes, makes a lot more sense now. Thanks for taking the time to explain it. Do you want me to snapshot this and submit it as documentation somewhere for later reference?

It probably should go somewhere, but as the number of people that do "test stable kernels in an automated way" is very low, so far I've been doing ok with a one-by-one explaination. I guess if it's more obvious, more people would test, so sure, this should be cleaned up...

Quoted 86 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

Quoted 85 lines · Thierry Reding

Quoted 62 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

Quoted 1 line · Thierry Reding

Hi Greg,

Sorry for the delay, this got pushed down my queue...

Quoted 29 lines

I stumbled across something as I was attempting to automate more parts of our process to generate these reports. The original test results were from a different version of the tree: 5.2.6-rc1-gdbc7f5c7df28. I suspect that's the same thing that you were discussing with Pavel regarding the IP tunnel patch that was added subsequent to the announcement.

Just for my understanding, does this mean that the patch still makes it into the 5.2.6 release, or was it supposed to go into 5.2.7?

One problem that I ran into was that when I tried to correlate the test results with your announcement email, there's no indication other than the branch name and the release candidate name (5.2.6-rc1 in this case), so there's no way to uniquely identify which test run belongs to the announcement. Given that there are no tags for the release candidates means that that's also not an option to uniquely associate with the builds and tests.

While the differences between the two builds are very minor here, I wonder if there could perhaps in the future be a problem where I report successful results for a test, but the same tests would be broken by a patch added to the stable-rc branch subsequent to the announcement. The test report would be misleading in that case.

I noticed that you do add a couple of X-KernelTest-* headers to your announcement emails, so I'm wondering if perhaps it was possible for you to add another one that contains the exact SHA1 that corresponds to the snapshot that's the release candidate. That would allow everyone to uniquely associate test results with a specific release candidate.

Quoted 3 lines

That said, perhaps I've just got this all wrong and there's already a way to connect all the dots that I'm not aware of. Or maybe I'm being too pedantic here?

You aren't being pedantic, I think you are missing exactly what the linux-stable-rc tree is for and how it is created.

Granted, it's not really documented anywhere so it's not your fault :)

The linux-stable-rc tree is there ONLY for people who want to test the -rc kernels and can not, or do not want to, use the quilt tree of patches in the stable-queue.git tree on kernel.org. I generate the branches there from a script that throws away the current -rc branch and rebuilds it "from scratch" by applying the patches that are in the stable-quilt tree and then adds the -rc patch as well. This tree is generated multiple times when I am working on the queues and then when I want to do a "real" -rc release.

The branches are constantly rebased, so you can not rely on 'git pull' doing the right thing (unless you add --rebase to it), and are there for testing only.

Yes, you will see different results of a "-rc1" release in the tree depending on the time of day/week when I created the tree, and sometimes I generate them multiple times a day just to have some of the auto-builders give me results quickly (Linaro does pull from it and sends me results within the hour usually).

Quoted 5 lines

So does that help? Ideally everyone would just use the quilt trees from stable-queue.git, but no everyone likes that, so the -rc git tree is there to make automated testing "easier". If that works with your workflow, wonderful, feel free to use it. If not, then go with the stable-quilt.git tree, or the tarballs on kernel.org.

I'll have to look into that, to see if that'd work. I have to admit that having a git tree to point scripts at is rather convenient for automation.

Quoted 4 lines

And as for the SHA1 being in the emails, that doesn't make all that much sense as that SHA1 doesn't live very long. When I create the trees locally, I instantly delete them after pushing them to kernel.org so I can't regenerate them or do anything with them.

Fair enough. I suppose the worst thing that could happen is that we may fail to test a couple of commits occasionally. In the rare case where this actually matters we'll likely end up reporting the failure for the stable release, in which case it can be fixed in the next one.

Quoted 1 line

DOes that help explain things better?

Quoted 8 lines

Quoted 3 lines

Yes, makes a lot more sense now. Thanks for taking the time to explain it. Do you want me to snapshot this and submit it as documentation somewhere for later reference?

It probably should go somewhere, but as the number of people that do "test stable kernels in an automated way" is very low, so far I've been doing ok with a one-by-one explaination. I guess if it's more obvious, more people would test, so sure, this should be cleaned up...

How about something like the below. It applies to the stable-queue.git repository.

Thierry

--- >8 ---
From 4083add6ccb4a1c23edeba650170470bcc5d5205 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Thierry Reding <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2019 10:58:35 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] Describe the stable-queue release process

Add a README file that describes how release candidates for stable kernels are created and how users are expected to use them. This is reworded from Greg's reply here:

	https://lore.kernel.org/stable/[email protected]/
---
 README | 31 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 31 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 README

README new file +21 -0

new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..868469a73f68
@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+This repository is the canonical source for patches that make up the stable
+kernel releases. It consists of a set of directories for each of the stable
+kernels, as well as a directory that contains a snapshot of the patches for
+each stable release.
+
+The patches for each release can be found along with a complete tarball of
+a release in the following location:
+
+	https://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/vX.Y/
+
+For each stable release candidate, a patch representing the diff of all the
+patches in the stable queue is uploaded here:
+
+	https://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/vX.Y/stable-review/
+
+As a convenience for people that want to test release candidates of stable
+releases, a branch of the kernel git tree is created containing all of the
+patches in the given stable queue. These branches are available in the
+following repository:
+
+	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git

This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.2.6 release. There are 20 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.

Responses should be made by Sun 04 Aug 2019 09:19:34 AM UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

The whole patch series can be found in one patch at:

	https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/stable-review/patch-5.2.6-rc1.gz

or in the git tree and branch at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git linux-5.2.y
and the diffstat can be found below.

thanks,

greg k-h

Quoted 14 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.2.6 release. There are 20 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.

Responses should be made by Sun 04 Aug 2019 09:19:34 AM UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

The whole patch series can be found in one patch at:

	https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/stable-review/patch-5.2.6-rc1.gz

or in the git tree and branch at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git linux-5.2.y
and the diffstat can be found below.

Quoted 4 lines

thanks,

greg k-h

Compiled and booted on my test system. No dmesg regressions.

This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.2.6 release. There are 20 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.

Responses should be made by Sun 04 Aug 2019 09:19:34 AM UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

The whole patch series can be found in one patch at:

        https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/stable-review/patch-5.2.6-rc1.gz

or in the git tree and branch at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git linux-5.2.y
and the diffstat can be found below.

thanks,

greg k-h

Quoted 15 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.2.6 release. There are 20 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.

Responses should be made by Sun 04 Aug 2019 09:19:34 AM UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

The whole patch series can be found in one patch at:

        https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/stable-review/patch-5.2.6-rc1.gz

or in the git tree and branch at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git linux-5.2.y
and the diffstat can be found below.

Quoted 3 lines

thanks,

greg k-h

Results from Linaro’s test farm.
No regressions on arm64, arm, x86_64, and i386.

This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.2.6 release. There are 20 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.

Responses should be made by Sun 04 Aug 2019 09:19:34 AM UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

Quoted 5 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.2.6 release. There are 20 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.

Quoted 3 lines

Responses should be made by Sun 04 Aug 2019 09:19:34 AM UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

Build results:

	total: 159 pass: 159 fail: 0
Qemu test results:
	total: 364 pass: 364 fail: 0