Re: [PATCH] fault-inject: support systematic fault injection

[Akinobu Mita]

2017-03-25 5:08 GMT+09:00 Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> Add /sys/kernel/debug/fail_once file that allows failing 0-th, 1-st, 2-nd
> and so on calls systematically. Excerpt from the added documentation:
>
> ===
> Write to this file of integer N makes N-th call in the current task fail
> (N is 0-based). Read from this file returns a single char 'Y' or 'N'
> that says if the fault setup with a previous write to this file was
> injected or not, and disables the fault if it wasn't yet injected.
> Note that this file enables all types of faults (slab, futex, etc).
> This setting takes precedence over all other generic settings like
> probability, interval, times, etc. But per-capability settings
> (e.g. fail_futex/ignore-private) take precedence over it.
> This feature is intended for systematic testing of faults in a single
> system call. See an example below.
> ===

The "/sys/kernel/debug/fail_once" contains per-task data.

Should we introduce new per-task file like "/proc/<pid>/fail-nth"
instead of adding a single global debugfs file?

> Why adding new setting:
> 1. Existing settings are global rather than per-task.
>    So parallel testing is not possible.
> 2. attr->interval is close but it depends on attr->count
>    which is non reset to 0, so interval does not work as expected.
> 3. Trying to model this with existing settings requires manipulations
>    of all of probability, interval, times, space, task-filter and
>    unexposed count and per-task make-it-fail files.
> 4. Existing settings are per-failure-type, and the set of failure
>    types is potentially expanding.
> 5. make-it-fail can't be changed by unprivileged user and aggressive
>    stress testing better be done from an unprivileged user.
>    Similarly, this would require opening the debugfs files to the
>    unprivileged user, as he would need to reopen at least times file
>    (not possible to pre-open before dropping privs).
>
> The proposed interface solves all of the above (see the example).