Conclusion and Acknowledgments

related to that bug. It was a tool of absolute last resort. I'd rather spend days looking at printk output than do a manual 'patch bisection'. With Git bisect it's a breeze: in the best case i can get a ~15 step kernel bisection done in 20-30 minutes, in an automated way. Even with manual help or when bisecting multiple, overlapping bugs, it's rarely more than an hour. In fact it's invaluable because there are bugs i would never even _try_ to debug if it wasn't for git bisect. In the past there were bug patterns that were immediately hopeless for me to debug - at best i could send the crash/bug signature to lkml and hope that someone else can think of something. And even if a bisection fails today it tells us something valuable about the bug: that it's non-deterministic - timing or kernel image layout dependent. So git bisect is unconditional goodness - and feel free to quote that ;-) _____________ Acknowledgments --------------- Many thanks to Junio Hamano for his help in reviewing this paper, for reviewing the patches I sent to the Git mailing list, for discussing some ideas and helping me improve them, for improving "git bisect" a lot and for his awesome work in maintaining and developing Git. Many thanks to Ingo Molnar for giving me very useful information that appears in this paper, for commenting on this paper, for his suggestions to improve "git bisect" and for evangelizing "git bisect" on the linux kernel mailing lists. Many thanks to Linus Torvalds for inventing, developing and evangelizing "git bisect", Git and Linux. Many thanks to the many other great people who helped one way or another when I worked on Git, especially to Andreas Ericsson, Johannes Schindelin, H. Peter Anvin, Daniel Barkalow, Bill Lear, John Hawley, Shawn O. Pierce, Jeff King, Sam Vilain, Jon Seymour. Many thanks to the Linux-Kongress program committee for choosing the author to given a talk and for publishing this paper. References ---------- - [[[1]]] https://web.archive.org/web/20091206032101/http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/n02-10.htm['Software Errors Cost U.S. Economy $59.5 Billion Annually'. Nist News Release.] See also https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/director/planning/report02-3.pdf['The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Infratructure for Software Testing'. Nist Planning Report 02-3], Executive Summary and Chapter 8. - [[[2]]] https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/codeconventions-introduction.html['Code Conventions for the Java Programming Language: 1. Introduction'. Sun Microsystems.] - [[[3]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_maintenance['Software maintenance'. Wikipedia.] - [[[4]]] https://lore.kernel.org/git/7vps5xsbwp.fsf_-_@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net/[Junio C Hamano. 'Automated bisect success story'.] - [[[5]]] https://lwn.net/Articles/317154/[Christian Couder. 'Fully automated bisecting with "git bisect run"'. LWN.net.] - [[[6]]] https://lwn.net/Articles/277872/[Jonathan Corbet. 'Bisection divides users and developers'. LWN.net.] - [[[7]]] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20071207113734.GA14598@elte.hu/[Ingo Molnar. 'Re: BUG 2.6.23-rc3 can't see sd partitions on Alpha'. Linux-kernel mailing list.] - [[[8]]] https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-bisect.html[Junio C Hamano and the git-list. 'git-bisect(1) Manual Page'. Linux Kernel Archives.] - [[[9]]] https://github.com/Ealdwulf/bbchop[Ealdwulf. 'bbchop'. GitHub.]

The text concludes with testimonials to the effectiveness of Git bisect from Ingo Molnar, followed by acknowledgments to various individuals who contributed to the paper, including Junio Hamano, Ingo Molnar, and Linus Torvalds. The acknowledgments also extend to other developers and the Linux-Kongress program committee. The text then provides a list of references cited in the paper, covering topics such as software errors, code conventions, software maintenance, and Git bisect.