stricter rate counter group allocation breaks applications

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Harald Welte laforge at gnumonks.org
Wed Dec 20 14:13:38 UTC 2017


Hi Neels,

On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 01:50:00AM +0100, Neels Hofmeyr wrote:
> A recent patch to libosmocore refuses to allocate a rate counter group with an
> index that already exists. Per se that's a good thing, but it needs fixes in a
> whole range of callers.
> 
> Numerous callers wrongly just pass 0 as rate counter group, so as soon as a
> second <thing> shows up, the application may deny service; that's unacceptable.
> For example, OsmoSGSN now crashes with the second subscriber showing up!
> 
> causing patch: https://gerrit.osmocom.org/5418
> my proposed change: https://gerrit.osmocom.org/5516

Thanks for your work-around which I have fixed.

But what does this story tell us:  Our testing still sucks, despite all the
existing efforts we put into it.

* how can a patch that breaks 'make check' of osmo-bts/openbsc/osmo-pcu, etc.
  be merged to libosmcoore?  Isn't that what we have inverse dependencies for
  in the gerrit verification jobs?

* how can it be that even after the patch is merged, we find the osmo-sgsn issue
  only by manual testing and not by automatic testing?

We all have to take a step back and seriously reflect on that.

> I'd like to request everyone to refrain from submitting patches that are
> insufficiently tested, in general of course, but in particular until after
> congress, please ;)

While I agree patches should be tested ahead of the merge, I also think
that this must not rely on manual testing but we should have sufficient
automatic testing in place.    If the 'gerrit build testing'
verification is not executing all existing tests or taking shortcts,
then we have to
a) think of speeding this up significantly (by throwing more hardware at
   it, or making tests execute faster), and/or
b) introduce an intermediate stage, something like a "staging" branch.
   So the existing code review and gerrit-jenkins-build-testing would
   make patches end up in 'staging' first, where then the slower
   (hourly/daily/...) tests like osmo-gsm-tester are executed.  And
   only once that's green, we go towards master.

So as much as I love CCC events and respect the people volunteering to bring
GSM and UMTS newtworks alive there (like yourself), I don't think that
any given single "event network" should dictate the patch merging.  If
that's the case, than we're doing things utterly wrong

Regards,
	Harald (who goes back to writing testing code)

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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