Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] improving storage testing

From: Johannes Thumshirn <jthumshirn@suse.de>
To: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org, linux-block@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] improving storage testing
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2019 11:55:07 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190214105507.GA9739@linux-x5ow.site> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20190213180754.GX23000@mit.edu>

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 01:07:54PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> 2) Documenting what are known failures should be for various tests on
> different file systems and kernel versions.  I think we all have our
> own way of excluding tests which are known to fail.  One extreme case
> is where the test case was added to xfstests (generic/484), but the
> patch to fix it got hung up because it was somewhat controversial, so
> it was failing on all file systems.

How about having a wiki page, either in the respective filesystems wiki or a
common wiki, that show's the list of test that are expected to fail for kernel
version X?

This is something I'm desperately looking for for brtfs for example.

[...]

> 3) Making blktests more stable/useful.  For someone who is not a block
> layer specialist, it can be hard to determine whether the problem is a
> kernel bug, a kernel misconfiguration, some userspace component (such
> as nvme-cli) being out of date, or just a test bug.  (For example, all
> srp/* tests are currently failing in blktests upstream; I had to pull
> some not-yet-merged commits from Bart's tree in order to fix bugs that
> caused all of srp to fail.)
> 
> Some of the things that we could do include documenting what kernel
> CONFIG options are needed to successfully run blktests, perhaps using
> a defconfig list.

Or checking for specific CONFIG_* settings in a test's requires() via
/proc/config.gz. This obviously won't work with kernels that don't have it.

> Also, there are expectations about minimum versions of bash that can
> be supported; but there aren't necessarily for other components such
> as nvme-cli, and I suspect that it is due to the use of a overly new
> version of nvme-cli from its git tree.  Is that supposed to work, or
> should I constrain myself to whatever version is being shipped in
> Fedora or some other reference distribution?  More generally, what is
> the overall expectations that should be expected?  xfstests has some
> extremely expansive set of sed scripts to normalize shell script
> output to make xfstests extremely portable; will patches along similar
> lines something that we should be doing for blktests?

I think this is the root cause of the problems you've sent out mails for this
week. A lot of blktests test need filtering. See [1] as an example.

[1] https://github.com/osandov/blktests/pull/34

Byte,
	Johannes
-- 
Johannes Thumshirn                            SUSE Labs Filesystems
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