On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 8:32 AM Minas Hambardzumyan minas@ti.com wrote:
On 10/14/24 15:32, Donald Zickus wrote:
Hi,
At Linux Plumbers, a few dozen of us gathered together to discuss how to expose what tests subsystem maintainers would like to run for every patch submitted or when CI runs tests. We agreed on a mock up of a yaml template to start gathering info. The yaml file could be temporarily stored on kernelci.org until a more permanent home could be found. Attached is a template to start the conversation.
Longer story.
The current problem is CI systems are not unanimous about what tests they run on submitted patches or git branches. This makes it difficult to figure out why a test failed or how to reproduce. Further, it isn't always clear what tests a normal contributor should run before posting patches.
It has been long communicated that the tests LTP, xfstest and/or kselftests should be the tests to run. However, not all maintainers use those tests for their subsystems. I am hoping to either capture those tests or find ways to convince them to add their tests to the preferred locations.
The goal is for a given subsystem (defined in MAINTAINERS), define a set of tests that should be run for any contributions to that subsystem. The hope is the collective CI results can be triaged collectively (because they are related) and even have the numerous flakes waived collectively (same reason) improving the ability to find and debug new test failures. Because the tests and process are known, having a human help debug any failures becomes easier.
The plan is to put together a minimal yaml template that gets us going (even if it is not optimized yet) and aim for about a dozen or so subsystems. At that point we should have enough feedback to promote this more seriously and talk optimizations.
Feedback encouraged.
Cheers, Don
# List of tests by subsystem # # Tests should adhere to KTAP definitions for results # # Description of section entries # # maintainer: test maintainer - name <email> # list: mailing list for discussion # version: stable version of the test # dependency: necessary distro package for testing # test: # path: internal git path or url to fetch from # cmd: command to run; ability to run locally # param: additional param necessary to run test # hardware: hardware necessary for validation # # Subsystems (alphabetical)
KUNIT TEST: maintainer: - name: name1 email: email1 - name: name2 email: email2 list: version: dependency: - dep1 - dep2 test: - path: tools/testing/kunit cmd: param: - path: cmd: param: hardware: none
Don,
thanks for initiating this! I have a few questions/suggestions:
I think the root element in a section (`KUNIT TEST` in your example) is expected to be a container of multiple test definitions ( so there will be one for LTP, KSelfTest, etc) -- can you confirm?
Actually I may have misled you. 'KUNIT TEST' was an example I picked out of the MAINTAINERS file as a maintained subsystem that folks contribute code too. Well it was the example folks suggested I use at plumbers (from what I recalled). Inside the subsystem container is a 'test' section that is the container of tests needed for the subsystem.
Assuming above is correct and `test` is a container of multiple test definitions, can we add more properties to each:
- name -- would be a unique name id for each test
- description -- short description of the test.
- arch -- applicable platform architectures
- runtime -- This is subjective as it can be different for different
systems. but maybe we can have some generic names, like 'SHORT', 'MEDIUM', 'LONG', etc and each system may scale the timeout locally?
Based on what I said above, does that change your thoughts a bit? In my head the tests are already out there and defined, I am not sure we can request them to be unique. And the description can be found in the url as I envisioned some tests being run across multiple subsystems, hence minimizing the duplication may be useful. Happy to be swayed in a different direction.
I like the idea of a 'timeout'. That has been useful for our tests internally. I can add that to the fields.
I see you have a `Subsystems` entry in comments section, but not in the example. Do you expect it to be part of this file, or will there be a file per each subsystem?
Hopefully my above comments clarifies your confusion? The subsystem is 'KUNIT TEST' in this example.
Can we define what we mean by a `test`? For me this is a group of one or more individual testcases that can be initiated with a single command-line, and is expected to run in a 'reasonable' time. Any other thoughts?
Yes. I was thinking a test(s) is something the subsystem maintainer expects all contributors (humans) or testers (human or CI bots) to that subsystem to run on posted patches. The test is expected to be command line driven (copy-n-paste is probably preferrable) and it can consist of multiple test command lines or a larger testsuite. Also happy to be swayed differently.
Interested in your feedback to my comments.
Cheers, Don
Thanks! Minas