linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH 4/4] generic: test locking when setting encryption policy

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Date:   Mon, 21 Nov 2016 15:41:06 -0800
From:   Eric Biggers <ebiggers@...gle.com>
To:     Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
Cc:     fstests@...r.kernel.org, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
        "Theodore Y . Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>,
        Jaegeuk Kim <jaegeuk@...nel.org>,
        Richard Weinberger <richard@....at>,
        David Gstir <david@...ma-star.at>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/4] generic: test locking when setting encryption policy

On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 08:32:51AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> 
> This means that reproducing the race condition is going to be
> machine dependent regardless of how the test is written.
> 
> In cases like this for XFS, we tend towards adding a debug sysfs
> file to introduce a delay into the code that allows the race to be
> triggered reliably. The delay is only included in CONFIG_XFS_DEBUG=y
> builds, and the test is conditional on the sysfs file being present.
> 
> e.g. xfs/051 uses a log recovery delay to allow us to reliably
> trigger IO errors in the middle of log recovery and hence exercise
> the IO error failure paths in the middle of recovery. This made an
> extremely unreliable reproducer into a test case that triggered
> reliably on every machine the test is run on....
> 
> Can something like this be done in this case?
> 

I'd really rather not do something like that just for this test, which is really
just testing that the kernel does inode_lock()/inode_unlock() in
fscrypt_process_policy().  It would be more worthwhile if the testing-only
kernel code would help expose many race conditions, not just this one particular
race in this particular ioctl.

So if you don't want to have the C version of this test in xfstests, I think it
should just be dropped from the series.

Eric
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