Re: [PATCH v3] rsync: add ptest support

[Jhonata Poma-Hansen <jhonata.poma@gmail.com>]

Hi Mathieu,

Thanks for the autobuilder pointer. I have just sent v4 (Message-Id
<20260429-b4-yocto-16211-v4-v4-1-211f27c4daea@gmail.com>); a short
write-up of what I found is below for the record.

The failure does not look timing-related. The valkyrie testresults log
shows ptest-runner returned status 0 after 139.84 seconds against a 450s
timeout, with no Killed process in dmesg, so nothing was cut short. The
failure is in the very last block of hardlinks.test:

    rm -rf "$fromdir" "$todir"
    makepath "$fromdir/sym" "$todir"
    checkit "$RSYNC -aH '$fromdir/sym' '$todir'" "$fromdir" "$todir"

checkit's dir-diff phase compares an ls-lR of $fromdir against an
ls-lR of $todir. The diff in the riscv64 log is exclusively on the
root directory entry's mtime:

    --- ls-from
    +++ ls-to
    @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
    -drwxr-xr-x   ...   2026-04-24 08:01:16 .
    +drwxr-xr-x   ...   2026-04-24 08:01:17 .
     drwxr-xr-x   ...   2026-04-24 08:01:16 ./sym

makepath creates both $fromdir and $todir in the same call, but $todir's
root mtime is then re-bumped when rsync places sym/ inside it. On a fast
target the whole sequence happens inside one wall-clock second so the
two mtimes still match. On qemuriscv64 it crosses a second boundary and
the test fails, even though rsync's hardlink handling itself worked
correctly (the rest of hardlinks.test, the inline checkit dir-diffs and
file-diffs, all pass).

v4 takes the smallest fix that keeps coverage on all non-emulated
archs: stub hardlinks.test as a SKIP on riscv64 and riscv32 only, with
test_skipped() so the SKIP shows up in the ptest log with a reason.
That avoids carrying a patch against upstream's testsuite for what is
arguably a slow-target race in the test setup rather than an rsync bug.
If you would prefer a different shape (only skipping the trailing
single-directory block, or extending the skip to other slow emulated
targets if the autobuilder shows the same failure there) let me know
and I will reroll.

Thanks again,
Jhonata

On 2026-04-24, Mathieu Dubois-Briand wrote:
> Hi Jhonata,
> Thanks for adding tests.
> It looks like this is failing on the autobuilder, riscv64 machine.
> This might be due to timings, as these machines tend to be slower.
>
> AssertionError:
> Failed ptests:
> {'rsync': ['hardlinks']}
>
> https://autobuilder.yoctoproject.org/valkyrie/#/builders/56/builds/1505
> https://valkyrie.yocto.io/pub/non-release/20260424-40/testresults/qemuriscv64-ptest/core-image-ptest-rsync/
>
> Can you have a look at the issue?
> Thanks, Mathieu