On Sun, Jul 3, 2022 at 4:15 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Sun, Jul 03, 2022 at 08:56:54AM +0300, Amir Goldstein wrote: > > > > That is true for some use cases, but unfortunately, the flaky > > fstests are way too valuable and too hard to replace or improve, > > so practically, fs developers have to run them, but not everyone does. > > > > Zorro has already proposed to properly tag the non deterministic tests > > with a specific group and I think there is really no other solution. > > The non-deterministic tests are not the sole, or even the most likely > cause of flaky tests. Or put another way, even if we used a > deterministic pseudo-random numberator seed for some of the curently > "non-determinstic tests" (and I believe we are for many of them > already anyway), it's not going to be make the flaky tests go away. > > That's because with many of these tests, we are running multiple > threads either in the fstress or fsx, or in the antogonist workload > that is say, running the space utilization to full to generate ENOSPC > errors, and then deleting a bunch of files to trigger as many ENOSPC > hitter events as possible. > > > The only question is whether we remove them from the 'auto' group > > (I think we should). > > I wouldn't; if someone wants to exclude the non-determistic tests, > once they are tagged as belonging to a group, they can just exclude > that group. So there's no point removing them from the auto group > IMHO. The reason I suggested that *we* change our habits is because we want to give passing-by fs testers an easier experience. Another argument in favor of splitting out -g soak from -g auto - You only need to run -g soak in a loop for as long as you like to be confident about the results. You need to run -g auto only once per definition - If a test ends up failing the Nth time you run -g auto then it belongs in -g soak and not in -g auto. > > > filesystem developers that will run ./check -g auto -g soak > > will get the exact same test coverage as today's -g auto > > and the "commoners" that run ./check -g auto will enjoy blissful > > determitic test results, at least for the default config of regularly > > tested filesystems (a.k.a, the ones tested by kernet test bot).? > > First of all, there are a number of tests today which are in soak or > long_rw which are not in auto, so "-g auto -g soak" will *not* result > in the "exact same test coverage". I addressed this in my proposal. I proposed to remove these two tests out of soak and asked for Darrick's opinion. Who is using -g soak anyway? > > Secondly, as I've tested above, deterministic tests does not > necessasrily mean determinsitic test results --- unless by > "determinsitic tests" you mean "completely single-threaded tests", > which would eliminate a large amount of useful test coverage. > To be clear, when I wrote deterministic, what I meant was deterministic results empirically, in the same sense that Bart meant - a test should always pass. Because Luis was using the expunge lists to blacklist any test failure, no matter the failure rate, the kdevops expunge lists could be used as a first draft for -g soak group, at least for tests that are blocklisted by kdevops for all of ext4,xfs and btrfs default configs on the upstream kernel. Thanks, Amir.