Re: [ANNOUNCE] fstests: for-next branch updated to v2025.02.23

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 09:33:19AM -0800, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> 
> Agreed.  I would very much have liked to continue single-instance
> testing in peace the same way I always have.  There are things that
> excite me that I would like to move onto; refactoring a large pile of
> bash is NOT one of them.

I'm also not particularly interested in check-parallel; the reason for
this is that using a 64-CPU system is *expensive*.  It's actually
cheaper to kick off multiple VM's and then shard the tests across
multiple VM's.  It's cheaper to use a multiple small, cheaper VM's
compared to a single large VM.

Sure, having a fast wall clock time is kinda cool.  But not everyone
has access to -- or can afford -- a 64-CPU behemonth.  (Either the
cost of the server, or the cost of electricity / air conditioning ---
I recently upgrading to an AMD Threadripper, although not a 64-CPU
server, since I'm not that wealthy, and was shocked to find that it
consumes 100W at *idle*.)

> Before anyone gets any ideas -- there is no grand plan or collaboration
> here.  Chinner posted an RFC[1] and wrote:
> 
> "This will probably take a bit of time, so I'd like to get the bug
> fixes, improvements and infrastructure changes underway so I'm not
> left carrying a huge patchset for months...."

Yeah, I'll say that I'm a bit annoyed myself, since I've been carrying
patches out of trees for *years* because Dave has objected that the
patches didn't reach his high standards, and then the cr*p that was
check-parallel got merged?  Because he's an XFS architect?  I can't
help but think that there is a massive double standard....

> > It's not just me who observes that. It seems that BTRFS is not tested
> > before release as thoroughly as other filesystems (probably just XFS).
> 
> Admittedly, I only run ext4/btrfs in the default configurations.  I only
> learned yesterday about SCRATCH_DEV_POOL because Felipe called that out.

I'm actually running ext4, xfs, btrfs, and f2fs on fs-next every day.
I used to update to xfstests's for-next quite regularly.  But given
how destablized for-next got, I reduced the regularity of updating to
the latest for-next, because I got busy and I didn't always have time
to debug for-next breakages....

						- Ted