The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn’t particularly happy with the pull request. In particular, he’s unhappy with some new “hdrtest” testing code being built as part of full kernel builds and the “turds” it leaves behind and this code “needs to die” at least from the perspective of non-DRM driver developers.
In a classic style Linus Torvalds mailing list post for a Friday night, he commented:
“Grr. I did the pull, resolved the (trivial) conflicts, but I notice that this ended up containing the disgusting “hdrtest” crap that
(a) slows down the build because it’s done for a regular allmodconfig build rather than be some simple thing that you guys can run as needed
(b) also leaves random ‘hdrtest’ turds around in the include directories
People already complained separately about this. It should never have made it to me in this broken form.
Why the heck is this testing being done as a regular part of the build?
And dammit we don’t add random turd files for dependencies that then make the source tree nasty.
The thing that made me notice that it was still there was that “git status” complains about the stupid turds not being ignored.
But more importantly, those turds also break filename completion! So no, adding it to gitignore doesn’t actually fix the problem, it would just have made me not notice as quickly.
This thing needs to *die*.
If you want to do that hdrtest thing, do it as part of your *own* checks. Don’t make everybody else see that disgusting thing and have those turds in their trees.
I’ll just disable it by marking it BROKEN for now. You guys can figure out what you want to do, but no, forcing others to see those things is not the answer.
I would suggest you *not* make this part of the Kconfig setup and normal build at all, but be something where *you* can run it as part of your tests (ie do it as a “make drm-hdrtest” kind of thing, not as part of regular builds).
Linus”
When seeing this mailing list post, my immediate assumption was it being some new HDR testing code that slipped under my radar from DRM-Next coverage, given all the ongoing High Dynamic Range / color management work happening recently for the Linux desktop. But when digging into the merge, it’s actually even more mundane. The “hdr” in this sense is around the C header files. The new “hdrtest” code is for the Intel Xe kernel driver and is around trying to help ensure the DRM header files are self-contained and pass kernel-doc tests. Basic maintenance checks on the included DRM header files to ensure they are all in good shape.
So all of the DRM-Next code has made it into Linux 6.15 Git as of tonight, but Linus Torvalds is expecting all this “hdrtest” mess to be cleaned up.
