Re: [PATCH net-next 0/7] net/selftests: TCP-AO selftests updates

From: Paolo Abeni
Date: Tue Jul 30 2024 - 06:52:01 EST


On 7/30/24 04:12, Dmitry Safonov wrote:
First 4 patches are more-or-less cleanups/preparations.

Patch 5 was sent to me/contributed off-list by Mohammad, who wants 32-bit
kernels to run TCP-AO.

Patch 6 is a workaround/fix for slow VMs. Albeit, I can't reproduce
the issue, but I hope it will fix netdev flakes for connect-deny-*
tests.

And the biggest change is adding TCP-AO tracepoints to selftests.
I think it's a good addition by the following reasons:
- The related tracepoints are now tested;
- It allows tcp-ao selftests to raise expectations on the kernel
behavior - up from the syscalls exit statuses + net counters.
- Provides tracepoints usage samples.

As tracepoints are not a stable ABI, any kernel changes done to them
will be reflected to the selftests, which also will allow users
to see how to change their code. It's quite better than parsing dmesg
(what BGP was doing pre-tracepoints, ugh).

Somewhat arguably, the code parses trace_pipe, rather than uses
libtraceevent (which any sane user should do). The reason behind that is
the same as for rt-netlink macros instead of libmnl: I'm trying
to minimize the library dependencies of the selftests. And the
performance of formatting text in kernel and parsing it again in a test
is not critical.

Current output sample:
ok 73 Trace events matched expectations: 13 tcp_hash_md5_required[2] tcp_hash_md5_unexpected[4] tcp_hash_ao_required[3] tcp_ao_key_not_found[4]

Previously, tracepoints selftests were part of kernel tcp tracepoints
submission [1], but since then the code was quite changed:
- Now generic tracing setup is in lib/ftrace.c, separate from
lib/ftrace-tcp.c which utilizes TCP trace points. This separation
allows future selftests to trace non-TCP events, i.e. to find out
an skb's drop reason, which was useful in the creation of TCP-CLOSE
stress-test (not in this patch set, but used in attempt to reproduce
the issue from [2]).
- Another change is that in the previous submission the trace events
where used only to detect unexpected TCP-AO/TCP-MD5 events. In this
version the selftests will fail if an expected trace event didn't
appear.
Let's see how reliable this is on the netdev bot - it obviously passes
on my testing, but potentially may require a temporary XFAIL patch
if it misbehaves on a slow VM.

It looks like this is not well digested by the CI, e.g.:

https://netdev.bots.linux.dev/flakes.html?tn-needle=tcp-ao

https://netdev-3.bots.linux.dev/vmksft-tcp-ao-dbg/results/705502/8-restore-ipv4/stdout

BTW wearing for a moment Cato the censor's shoes, I note that patch 1 && 2 commit messages are quite more informal and less informative than the average;)

Thanks,

Paolo