Approach to system testing for Osmocom stack

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Holger Freyther holger at freyther.de
Sun Feb 4 22:35:04 UTC 2018



> On 29. Jan 2018, at 21:52, Holger Freyther <holger at freyther.de> wrote:
> 

Hey,

I wish I had better news. Instead of an end to end test I realize that picking "asyncio" was a grave mistake. Besides the lack AF_UNIX SOCK_DGRAM support, the process support is dangerous and doesn't scale. Today I stumbled into SIGCHLD handling of spawned processes. While normally neither virthphy/mobile would prematurely exit, a few exits could take the entire test down.

Speculating from the behavior of strace:

* SIGCHLD arrives
* Something will be written into one end of a socketpair[1]
* In the python code on wait(2) will be called on every registered process
(https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.6/Lib/asyncio/unix_events.py#L819)

As more processes exit the main python code is still in the for loop and the buffer runs full. It also means that the main application will be busy executing Xk syscalls instead of launching processes or events.


It is unfortunate that I only notice now but probably still better than having to deal mysterious failures of processes not starting and all tests failing. As not many people here know Go. I think I will stay with python but use the lower level epoll API directly. So we end up with a single "select" system... I should finally have something during the week.

I hope all of you had a nice fosdem!

holger


[1] A common trick to notify one thread or part of the application of an event. There is not much that is allowed in a signal handler so using a buffer is a reasonable approach.. It should forward the PID of the process that exited though.


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