Re: [PATCH 5/6] selftests: Preserve subtarget failures in all/install

[Shuah Khan]

On 4/15/26 07:58, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 20, 2026 at 03:29:20PM -0300, Ricardo B. Marlière wrote:
> > Track failures explicitly in the top-level selftests all/install loops.
> >
> > The current code multiplies `ret` by each sub-make exit status. For
> > example, with `TARGETS=net`, the implicit `net/lib` dependency runs after
> > `net`, so a failed `net` build can be followed by a successful `net/lib`
> > build and reset the final result to success.
> >
> > Set `ret` to 1 on any non-zero sub-make exit code and keep it sticky, so
> > the top-level make returns failure when any selected selftest target
> > fails.
>
> This patch, which is now in mainline as 7e47389142b8, is breaking a
> bunch of CI systems - at least KernelCI, our Arm internal CI and my
> personal stuff.  It causes the equivalent of FORCE_TARGETS behaviour in
> the top level Makefile, the prior behaviour where the exit status of the
> top level Makefile ignores failures from individual directories is
> desirable since by default we try to build almost all the selftests but
> between quality issues and build time dependencies it's very common for
> at least one of them to fail.  With this commit unless the user has
> configured a more restricted set of selftests it would be surprising if
> we manage to get a successful build and install.
>
> As well as being a poor default due to the very high likelyhood of build
> failures this also has the undesirable effect of causing a build failure
> in one selftest to cause the whole install target to fail, meaning that
> the build failure is escallated to a complete lost of coverge for all
> selftests in common CI usage.
>
> This wasn't showing up in my -next build tests since I set FORCE_TARGETS
> and explicitly choose a restricted set of kselftests which actually
> build with my system and configuration.  It was less obvious than it
> should have been with the other systems since they did not expect there
> to be a complete failure to generate a kselftest tarball and variously
> masked the error or reported it in a manner that looked like an
> infrastructure issue.

I didn't see it when I did test on linux-next and my repo. I did install
to catch problems.

Sorry for not catching this. We can drop this patch.

> It would be really nice to get to the point where we can reasonably do
> this but we're simply not there at the current time.  At the moment if
> people want to see build failures reported at the top level that really
> needs to be opt in, we have FORCE_TARGETS for that.

Good point - I will go look and see if we document this in kselftest doc
and add it.

Mark, would you like to a revert for this?

thanks,
-- Shuah