Revisiting the ZFS test suite

[Alan Somers]

On Sun, Oct 6, 2019 at 10:20 AM Allan Jude <allanjude at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On 2019-10-04 12:23, Alan Somers wrote:
> > My employment status changed last week, and I find myself once again
> > working on ZFS.  It's hard to have confidence in any changes without a
> > solid test suite, so my main task right now is to fix the problems in
> > FreeBSD's ZFS test suite.  Our most recent run had 64 failed tests and 99
> > skipped ones; let's get those down to 0 and something small,
> respectively.
> >
> > https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-amd64-test_zfs/3880/testReport/
> >
> > Would anybody be interested to review my changes to the test suite?  It's
> > not terrible if I have to commit without review; I can't possibly break
> > anything but the test suite itself.
> >
> > -Alan
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>
> Have you followed the work here:
>
> https://github.com/zfsonfreebsd/ZoF
>
> That has ported the improved ZFS test suite from ZFSonLinux back to
> FreeBSD (as part of the effort to upstream FreeBSD support into that
> newer version of ZFS)
>
> --
> Allan Jude
>

Oh, boy, I didn't know about that fork of the test suite.  When I made
FreeBSD's, I didn't try for portability.  Merging the two will not be
easy.  There are > 60,000 lines of diffs between the two, plus  > 1,000
files that don't exist on both sides.  Worse, there are some major
structural differences:
1) FreeBSD's test suite runs as root and drops privileges selectively, but
ZoL's runs as an unprivileged user and uses sudo selectively to gain
privileges
2) FreeBSD's test suite uses ATF, just like everything else, but ZoL's test
suite uses a bespoke python program
3) FreeBSD's test suite runs setup and cleanup once for every test file,
but ZoL does it once for every directory of test files.
4) FreeBSD's test suite uses FreeBSD make, but ZoL's uses autotools and
gmake

Of those item 3 is the most troubling.  I wonder if ZoL could be convinced
to switch to ATF and Kyua?  They're pretty portable.
-Alan