[Bug 1169984] Re: 3.8.0-18 HDMI audio regression: Either oops or opening device fails with -ENODEV

[David Henningsson]

On 05/19/2013 10:47 AM, madbiologist wrote:
> I too have been wondering how this was missed during pre-release testing
> of Raring.  Hopefully the testing of HDMI audio (according to the bug
> description analog built-in audio is only broken on some machines) will
> now become part of Ubuntu's standard testing procedures.

To answer for my own part in this:

The regression went into the almost very latest kernel before the 
release, so when the bug was discovered (I sent a patch for it the 18th 
of April) it was very late - since new kernels require new images, new 
installation tests on various hardware and so on, pressing the big red 
panic button to redo all of that, is not to be taken lightly.

It's also hard to predict the scale of a bug - it doesn't happen for all 
HDMI Audio cards, (I've never seen it on my own) so I didn't know how 
many would actually be hit by this. In this case, when I saw all the 
duplicates coming in, I first made sure this bug went into the release 
notes (with help from Andy Whitcroft), and later, I wrote a letter to 
the kernel team to highlight that many people were being hit, and asking 
if there was anything I could do to help speed the process up [1]. The 
only answer was [2].

On top of that we have just had a security bug which I believe is 
relatively severe (the perf privilege escalation), causing the regular 
updates to be delayed as a result.

Looking back, is it a matter of bad luck that this bug still is not 
released into the -updates repository, or could the process of updating 
kernels be improved? If you have constructive feedback on how the kernel 
team's process of updating kernels could be improved, please contact the 
kernel team - they have a mailing list as well as weekly IRC meetings.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2013-April/027938.html
[2] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2013-April/027943.html



-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
https://launchpad.net/~diwic