[PATCH v2 0/6] fix test failures on larger core systems

Stephen Hemminger
2026-01-20T01:58:08Z

This series addresses several test failures that occur sporadically on
systems with many cores (32+), particularly on AMD Zen architectures.
I think Ferruh may have addressed similar problems in earlier
releases.

The root causes fall into three categories:

1. Missing rte_pause() in synchronization spinloops (patch 1)
Tight spinloops without pause cause SMT thread starvation and
unpredictable timing behavior.

2. Fixed iteration counts that don't scale (patch 2)
The atomic test performs 1M iterations per worker regardless of
core count. With 32+ cores, contention causes timeout failures.

3. File-prefix collisions during parallel test execution (patches 5-6)
Multiple tests using the default "rte" prefix compete for the same
fbarray files, causing EAL initialization failures.

Additionally, two BPF-related fixes that I was seeing on
this system.

4. Lack of error checking in BPF elf load test (patch 3)

5. Unsupported BPF instructions with newer clang (patch 4)
Clang 20+ generates JMP32 instructions that DPDK BPF doesn't support.

v2 - Drop the unnecessary fsync()
- Rework the file prefix handling for trace tests

Stephen Hemminger (6):
test: add pause to synchronization spinloops
test: fix timeout for atomic test on high core count systems
test: fix error handling in ELF load tests
test: fix unsupported BPF instructions in elf load test
test: add file-prefix for all fast-tests on Linux
test: fix trace_autotest_with_traces parallel execution

app/test/bpf/meson.build | 3 +-
app/test/suites/meson.build | 23 +++++++++----
app/test/test_atomic.c | 67 ++++++++++++++++++++++---------------
app/test/test_bpf.c | 3 +-
app/test/test_threads.c | 17 +++++-----
5 files changed, 70 insertions(+), 43 deletions(-)

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2.51.0