The Linux 6.10 kernel is currently in the candidate development stage, and in a mailing list about the DRM graphics driver update patch, Linus Torvalds described himself as a true believer in "dogfooding" .
"Dogfooding" is an English slang abbreviation for "Eating your own dog food" (literally translated as "eating your own dog food" ), often used to describe companies (especially software companies) using their own products.
In the software development process, dogfooding allows developers to test their company's products in real-life scenarios, which gives project managers a better understanding of how the product will be used before it is released.
There are various ways of dogfooding, such as establishing build branches, creating personal builds and direct personal testing. These methods can help developers test the feasibility of changes before integrating them into daily builds, thus making the builds more efficient. It is stable and can avoid possible inconsistencies and dependency problems, especially when many developers (or development teams) participate in the development of the same product.
For Linus, "eating kernel dog food" will undoubtedly help him personally experience the problems that users may encounter, investigate bug reports in a timely manner, and ensure that the passed code works as expected. In addition, it also helps to discover unexpected problems in the code and improve the stability and quality of the kernel.
Linus has been dogfooding, building his own kernels even during busy merge windows - and then running the latest Linux kernel code on AMD development machines . Of course, he does not restart the machine every time he pulls new code, usually every day.
Retrieved from https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wizH1b8vv67xVSoSHqp5B=dNsqtpP+86RM7G5z14nuRHw@mail.gmail.com/
You must know that a lot of new code (and bugs) will be introduced during the merge window, so you can imagine how much work the old man has. However, in order to fully test the kernel changes, Linus did not relax because of this. He is indeed a role model for programmers of our generation!