Re: Freezing (was: Re: fstests generic/441 -- occasional bcachefs failure)

[Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2023 at 12:09:20PM -0500, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 02, 2023 at 10:50:23AM -0500, Brian Foster wrote:
> > I don't have a public repo atm but I've posted the patch if you have
> > somewhere to land it for CI testing..? It survived my regression tests
> > so far, FWIW. (I also had posted that random cleanup patch a bit ago if
> > you hadn't noticed..).
> 
> Must have missed it, sorry. I can host a git repo for you on my server,
> or github works fine - I generally prefer git repo links, git am is
> always a bit of a hassle.
> 

Sounds good.

> > Is there a reporting dashboard or something available for the test
> > infrastruture for bcachefs?
> 
> https://evilpiepirate.org/~testdashboard/ci
> 
> I've got a small server farm that watches git branches and runs the
> entire test suite on every commit starting from the recent - once you've
> got a git branch up I'll add yours to the list it watches.
> 

Cool. I see that it reproduces the generic/441 failure.

I need to use GitLab for other things so I managed to create a project
cloning your repo there and pushed a testing branch with both of those
commits. I think it should be accessible here:

https://gitlab.com/bfoster2/bcachefs.git bf-bcachefs-testing

... but let me know if it doesn't work.

> You'll probably want to get acquainted with ktest, it's what both the CI
> uses for running tests, and what we use for local development:
> 
> https://evilpiepirate.org/git/ktest.git
> 

I'll check it out, thanks!

Brian

> > > Freeze definitely needs to happen. It's been _ages_ since I was looking
> > > at it so I couldn't say offhand where we'd need to start, but if you're
> > > interested I'd be happy to look at what it'd take.
> > > 
> > 
> > Yeah, that would be interesting. Thanks.
> 
> Maybe we could get Dave to give us a brief rundown of freezing? It's
> been ages since I was thinking about that and it's all fallen out of my
> brain, but Dave was the one who was able to explain it to me before :)
> 
> I think getting freezing done would up our test coverage by a good bit,
> so it's worth prioritizing.
> 
> > FWIW, I was reading through the "Journaling" and "Sequential
> > consistency" sections of the architecture documentation [1]. It's
> > possible I just misinterpreted some wording.
> > 
> > [1] https://bcachefs.org/Architecture/#Journaling
> 
> *nod* Thanks for the link, that's old but not ancient - that's from when
> the journal seq blacklist mechanism was how we did sequential
> consistency.
> 
> Whenever I find the time to work on documentation again, I want to move
> more stuff (including that sort of high level developer documentation)
> to the principles of operation: https://bcachefs.org/bcachefs-principles-of-operation.pdf
> 
> Right now it's more end user documentation, but last I was working on
> that I was starting to add documentation centered around on disk data
> structures - i.e. btrees and key types, and it seemed to be going in a
> useful direction.
>