Re: [LSF/MM/BPF ATTEND][LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] : blktests: status, expansion plan for the storage stack test framework

Haris Iqbal
2026-02-25T10:15:23Z

On Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 8:44 AM Johannes Thumshirn
<Johannes.Thumshirn@wdc.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/15/26 10:18 PM, Haris Iqbal wrote:
> >> From my view, blktests keep on finding kernel bugs. I think it demonstrates the
> >> value of this community effort, and I'm happy about it. Said that, I find what
> >> blktests can improve more, of course. Here I share the list of improvement
> >> opportunities from my view point (I already mentioned the first three items).
> > A possible feature for blktest could be integration with something
> > like virtme-ng.
> > Running on VM can be versatile and fast. The run can be made parallel
> > too, by spawning multiple VMs simultaneously.
>
> This is actually rather trivial to solve I have some pre-made things for
> fstests and that can be adopted for blktests as well:
>
> vng \
> --user=root -v --name vng-tcmu-runner \
> -a loglevel=3 \
> --run $KDIR \
> --cpus=8 --memory=8G \
> --exec "~johannes/src/ci/run-fstests.sh" \
> --qemu-opts="-device virtio-scsi,id=scsi0 -drive
> file=/dev/sda,format=raw,if=none,id=zbc0 -device
> scsi-block,bus=scsi0.0,drive=zbc0" \
> --qemu-opts="-device virtio-scsi,id=scsi1 -drive
> file=/dev/sdb,format=raw,if=none,id=zbc1 -device
> scsi-block,bus=scsi1.0,drive=zbc1"
>
> and run-fstests.sh is:
>
> #!/bin/sh
> # SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
>
> DIR="/tmp/"
> MKFS="mkfs.btrfs -f"
> FSTESTS_DIR="/home/johannes/src/fstests"
> HOSTCONF="$FSTESTS_DIR/configs/$(hostname -s)"
> TESTDEV="$(grep TEST_DEV $HOSTCONF | cut -d '=' -f 2)"
>
> mkdir -p $DIR/{test,scratch,results}
> $MKFS $TESTDEV
>
> cd $FSTESTS_DIR
> ./check -x raid
>
> I'm not sure it'll make sense to include this into blktests other than
> maybe providing an example in the README.

You're right. It is pretty trivial to run on VMs, but only after
everything is set up.
Adding it to blktests would allow this setup to be done (and run tests
after that) on any system by running just a couple of commands.

>
>
> Byte,
>
> Johannes
>