Re: [PATCH] fstests: btrfs/012 don't follow symlinks for populating $SCRATCH_MNT

["Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@kernel.org>]

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 01:18:52AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 04:13:19PM -0400, Josef Bacik wrote:
> > /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/ can have symlinks to the source tree where the
> > kernel was built from, which can have all sorts of stuff, which will
> > make the runtime for this test exceedingly long.  We're just trying to
> > copy some data into our tree to test with, we don't need the entire
> > devel tree of whatever we're doing, so use -P to not follow symlinks
> > when copying.
> 
> Btw, if you're touching this test can you make it _notrun if the
> directory doesn't exist?  This test always fails for VMs without
> any modules.

If you just want some filler content for the "old" ext4 filesystem, why
not simply copy something that's guaranteed to exist like /etc or /var?
And perhaps use timeout(1) to control the cp runtime?

(I don't have the symlink problem, but I occasionally watch this test
suddenly take forever if I accidentally turn off module compression
and/or slim debuginfo...)

--D