[PATCH v3 00/14] test: fix test failures on high cores

Stephen Hemminger
2026-01-22T00:54:04Z

This series addresses several categories of test infrastructure issues:

1. Spinloop synchronization fixes (patch 1)

Tests using tight spinloops for thread synchronization cause sporadic
failures on high core count AMD Zen systems. The loops starve SMT
sibling threads and create race conditions. Adding rte_pause() to
all synchronization spinloops fixes these issues.

2. Test scaling for high core count systems (patches 2-5)

Several tests use fixed iteration counts that cause timeouts on
systems with many cores due to increased lock contention. A new
helper function test_scale_iterations() scales iterations inversely
with core count to maintain roughly constant test duration.

Affected tests:
- atomic_autotest (Bugzilla #952)
- mcslock_autotest
- stack_autotest
- timer_secondary_autotest

3. BPF test fixes (patches 6-8, 14)

- Fix missing error handling in ELF load tests
- Fix clang 20+ compatibility by restricting to BPF v2 instruction
set (Bugzilla #1844)
- Skip ELF test gracefully if null PMD is disabled
- Fix incorrect size parameter in Rx/Tx load tests

4. Parallel test execution fixes (patches 9-10)

Multiple tests colliding on the default "rte" file-prefix causes EAL
initialization failures when running tests in parallel. Restore unique
file-prefix for all fast-tests on Linux, including a separate prefix
for trace_autotest_with_traces.

5. Test skip conditions (patches 11-13)

Tests that depend on optional drivers (null PMD, eventdev) should skip
gracefully when those drivers are disabled via -Ddisable_drivers=
rather than failing.

v4 - add additional scaling for failures reported on 96 core system
- gracefully handle case where null PMD disabled in build

Stephen Hemminger (14):
test: add pause to synchronization spinloops
test: scale atomic test based on core count
test/mcslock: scale test based on number of cores
test/stack: scale test based on number of cores
test/timer: scale test based on number of cores
test/bpf: fix error handling in ELF load tests
test/bpf: fix unsupported BPF instructions in ELF load test
test/bpf: skip ELF test if null PMD disabled
test: add file-prefix for all fast-tests on Linux
test: fix trace_autotest_with_traces parallel execution
test/eventdev: skip test if eventdev driver disabled
test/pcapng: skip test if null driver missing
test/vdev: skip test if no null PMD
test/bpf: pass correct size for Rx/Tx load tests

app/test/bpf/meson.build | 3 +-
app/test/meson.build | 4 +-
app/test/suites/meson.build | 19 +++++---
app/test/test.h | 19 ++++++++
app/test/test_atomic.c | 66 ++++++++++++++++------------
app/test/test_bpf.c | 13 ++++--
app/test/test_event_eth_tx_adapter.c | 11 +++--
app/test/test_mcslock.c | 10 +++--
app/test/test_stack.c | 8 ++--
app/test/test_threads.c | 17 +++----
app/test/test_timer_secondary.c | 14 +++---
11 files changed, 121 insertions(+), 63 deletions(-)

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2.51.0