Re: [PATCH v3 10/10] selftests/liveupdate: Add a test for preserving tmpfs files

[David Matlack]

On 2026-11-04 02:37 PM, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
> On 11-04 17:59, Pratyush Yadav wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 03 2026, David Matlack wrote:
> > [...]
> > 
> > Umm, no way I am reading all this...
> > 
> > LLMs are great at generating tests, and I'm not saying there is no value
> > in this. It is just that this massive code dump is unreviewable by
> > humans. It is also unfair to the human reviewer because it took many
> > orders of magnitude less effort to _write_ them with an LLM.
> > 
> > What do you all reckon we should do about this? Trust the LLM to get the
> > testing right? Do we give up human maintenance of tests entirely? Do we
> > do fault injection to test the tests themselves?
> > 
> > Or do we make the tests smaller and more human reviewable?
> 
> We need good test coverage, but I believe we can break this patch down 
> into smaller changes where tested features are incrementally added.

Agreed that it needs to be easier to review, but I'd like to keep the
coverage. Here's what I have in mind for v4:

 - Move the preserve-side checks that don't need a kexec into
   liveupdate.c, like Pasha suggested in his earlier reply: which files
   can be preserved (permissions, read-only and append-only files), the
   frozen size while preserved, and unpreserve. Those then run with the
   regular kselftests instead of only in vmtest.sh.

 - Split the rest of luo_tmpfs into several smaller commits that add the
   tested features incrementally, e.g. one for the test infrastructure
   and basic retrieve, one for the open() flags and creation checks, and
   one for block accounting. That makes the series longer, but each
   commit is a few hundred lines and can be reviewed on its own.

It will still be long, but I think having the test coverage is worth it.

Does that sound reasonable?