Re: [PATCH RFC] fstests: use MOUNT_OPTIONS to populate TEST_FS_MOUNT_OPTS if possible

[Zorro Lang <zlang@kernel.org>]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2026 at 09:13:30PM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 05, 2026 at 12:46:13AM +0800, Zorro Lang wrote:
> > Right now, the biggest inconsistent issue is probably with those feature-probing
> > helpers. They often check TEST_DIR to determine behaviors for SCRATCH_MNT. While
> > this works fine for features unaffected by mount options, but we might should
> > handle mount options related features (for TEST_DEV or SCRATCH_DEV) separately.
> 
> Yes, I've run into a lot of issues when TEST_DIR has more feature than
> SCRATCH_DEV.  The problem is just that feature testing for scratch is
> a bit annoying because we have to create a file system for it first.

Yeah, if we make those _require_*feature or _has_*feature helpers accept a
parameter like "local dev="${TEST_DEV:-$1}" to allow specifying $SCRATCH_DEV,
it would mean we can only call these helpers after running _scratch_mkfs or
even _scratch_mount. I haven't come up with a better idea for now ...

> 
> It might make sense to catch some of the results, but then again we have
> tests that override options for the scratch side so that this won't
> apply.
> 
> I've been wanting to look into splitting the scratch tests up into those
> that "just" format the file systems, and those testing very specific
> corners cases using special options.  Especially as we should not have
> to run the latter multiple times for different configurations.

Hopefully, specifying the same TEST_FS_MOUNT_OPTS and MOUNT_OPTIONS for XFS
can help resolve some of the issues you encountered. But that doesn't help if
your TEST_DEV and SCRATCH_DEV are different devices.

About separating "corner cases using special options", xfstests always welcome
"finer-grained" group tags to better categorize and differentiate these test
cases.

Thanks,
Zorro

> 
>