About
All packaged kernels for testing you can download from koji
3.9.9 is working fine and the problem occurs with the 3.10.9 upgrade. Let there be 8 patches between 3.9.9 and 3.10.9. When you start to bisect, it enables only half of those patches and you build a kernel with 4 of the 8 patches between those two versions. Now you boot your new compiled kernel and see if you can reproduce the problem. If the kernel is good you take the second half of those 8 patches to build the next kernel, if the kernel is bad you take half of the patches used to narrow down on the patch that causes problems.
For this given example, here is what might happen to find the bad patch (each step you have to build the kernel and reboot into it).
We call the patches 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8:
- 3.9.9 + 1,2,3,4
- bad → 3.9.9 + 1,2
- good → 3.9.9 + 3,4
- bad → 3.9.9 + 3
- bad → patch 3 it is!
Prepare
Installing git:
# yum install git -y
Usage
Get the git sources
$ cd ~ $ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git $ git clone http://github.com/ignatenkobrain/kernel-package.git $ cd linux
This creates the folder ~/linux
Start bisect
$ git bisect start $ git bisect bad v3.11-rc1 $ git bisect good v3.9
Build and install the kernel
$ cd ~/linux $ ~/kernel-package/kernel-package.py $ mock -r fedora-19-x86_64 --rebuild sources/*.src.rpm --resultdir sources/rpms # yum install sources/rpms/*.rpm
Reboot and test problem..
Bad bisect
$ cd ~/linux $ git bisect bad
Goto #Build the kernel
Good bisect
$ cd ~/linux $ git bisect good
Goto #Build the kernel
Unknown bisect
$ cd ~/linux $ git bisect skip
Goto #Build the kernel
Final bisect
You repeat those steps #Bad bisect and #Good bisect until it shows the content of the bad patch, like shown below (there is more text in the output, this is just half of it).
c630ccf1a127578421a928489d51e99c05037054 is the first bad commit commit c630ccf1a127578421a928489d51e99c05037054 Author: Stanislaw Gruszka <stf_xl@wp.pl> Date: Sat Mar 16 19:19:46 2013 +0100 rt2800: rearrange bbp/rfcsr initialization This makes order of initialization of various registers similar like on vendor driver. Based on: NICInitializeAsic() RT5592LoadRFNormalModeSetup() from: DPO_RT5572_LinuxSTA_2.6.1.3_20121022/common/rtmp_init.c DPO_RT5572_LinuxSTA_2.6.1.3_20121022/chip/rt5592.c Signed-off-by: Stanislaw Gruszka <stf_xl@wp.pl> Tested-by: Wanlong Gao <gaowanlong@cn.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: John W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com> :040000 040000 69266bfa97e9e808257f9cfa7196f00222410ebf 7e18f08faa95bb3dd7159381d6085e5b5287809c M drivers
With this information, you can create a bug report at RHBZ and tell the developers what patch causes problems. The bisect.log file can be attached to the bug report.
Log file
$ cd ~/linux $ git bisect log > ~/bisect.log
Reset bisect
If you get stuck somewhere or made a mistake, you can reset.
$ cd ~/linux $ git bisect reset