Re: [PATCH bpf-next 0/4] selftests/bpf: add a new runner for bpftool tests

Alexis Lothoré
2026-01-16T07:58:00Z

Hi Andrii,

On Thu Jan 15, 2026 at 6:58 PM CET, Andrii Nakryiko wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 12:59 AM Alexis Lothoré (eBPF Foundation)
> <alexis.lothore@bootlin.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>> this series is part of the larger effort aiming to convert all
>> standalone tests to the CI runners so that they are properly executed on
>> patches submission.
>>
>> Some of those tests are validating bpftool behavior(test_bpftool_map.sh,
>> test_bpftool_metadata.sh, test_bpftool_synctypes.py, test_bpftool.py...)
>> and so they do not integrate well in test_progs. This series proposes to
>
> Can you elaborate why they do not integrate well? In my mind,
> test_progs should be the only runner into which we invest effort
> (parallel tests, all the different filtering, etc; why would we have
> to reimplement subsets of this). The fact that we have test_maps and
> test_verifier is historical and if we had enough time we'd merge all
> of them into test_progs.
>
> What exactly in test_progs would prevent us from implementing bpftool
> test runner?

I don't think there is any strong technical blocker preventing from
integrating those tests directly into test_progs. That's rather about
the fact that test_progs tests depends (almost) exclusively on
libbpf/skeletons. Those bpftool tests rather need to directly execute
bpftool and parse its stdout output, so I thought that it made sense to
have a dedicated runner for this. If I'm wrong and so if those tests
should rather be moved in the test_progs runner (eg to avoid duplicating
the runner features), I'm fine with it. Any additional opinion on this
is welcome.

Thanks,

Alexis
--
Alexis Lothoré, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering