[LTP] [RFC PATCH] madvise06: shrink to 1 MADV_WILLNEED page to stabilize the test

[Li Wang]

Paul Bunyan reports that the madvise06 test fails intermittently with many
LTS kernels, after checking with mm developer we prefer to think this is
more like a test issue (but not kernel bug):

   madvise06.c:231: TFAIL: 4 pages were faulted out of 2 max

So this improvement is target to reduce the false positive happens from
three points:

  1. Adding the while-loop to give more chances for madvise_willneed()
     reads memory asynchronously
  2. Raise value of `loop` to let test waiting for more times if swapchache
     haven't reached the expected
  3. Shrink to only 1 page for MADV_WILLNEED verifying to make the system
     easily takes effect on it

>From Rafael Aquini:

  The problem here is that MADV_WILLNEED is an asynchronous non-blocking
  hint, which will tell the kernel to start doing read-ahead work for the
  hinted memory chunk, but will not wait up for the read-ahead to finish.
  So, it is possible that when the dirty_pages() call start re-dirtying
  the pages in that target area, is racing against a scheduled swap-in
  read-ahead that hasn't yet finished. Expecting faulting only 2 pages
  out of 102400 also seems too strict for a PASS threshold.

Note:
  As Rafael suggested, another possible approach to tackle this failure
  is to tally up, and loosen the threshold to more than 2 major faults
  after a call to madvise() with MADV_WILLNEED.
  But from my test, seems the faulted-out page shows a significant
  variance in different platforms, so I didn't take this way.

Btw, this patch get passed on my two easy reproducible systems more than 1000 times

Signed-off-by: Li Wang <liwang@redhat.com>
Cc: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Cc: Paul Bunyan <pbunyan@redhat.com>
Cc: Richard Palethorpe <rpalethorpe@suse.com>
---
 testcases/kernel/syscalls/madvise/madvise06.c | 21 +++++++++++++------
 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/testcases/kernel/syscalls/madvise/madvise06.c b/testcases/kernel/syscalls/madvise/madvise06.c
index 6d218801c..bfca894f4 100644
--- a/testcases/kernel/syscalls/madvise/madvise06.c
+++ b/testcases/kernel/syscalls/madvise/madvise06.c
@@ -164,7 +164,7 @@ static int get_page_fault_num(void)
 
 static void test_advice_willneed(void)
 {
-	int loops = 50, res;
+	int loops = 100, res;
 	char *target;
 	long swapcached_start, swapcached;
 	int page_fault_num_1, page_fault_num_2;
@@ -202,23 +202,32 @@ static void test_advice_willneed(void)
 		"%s than %ld Kb were moved to the swap cache",
 		res ? "more" : "less", PASS_THRESHOLD_KB);
 
-
-	TEST(madvise(target, PASS_THRESHOLD, MADV_WILLNEED));
+	loops = 100;
+	SAFE_FILE_LINES_SCANF("/proc/meminfo", "SwapCached: %ld", &swapcached_start);
+	TEST(madvise(target, pg_sz, MADV_WILLNEED));
 	if (TST_RET == -1)
 		tst_brk(TBROK | TTERRNO, "madvise failed");
+	do {
+		loops--;
+		usleep(100000);
+		if (stat_refresh_sup)
+			SAFE_FILE_PRINTF("/proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh", "1");
+		SAFE_FILE_LINES_SCANF("/proc/meminfo", "SwapCached: %ld",
+				&swapcached);
+	} while (swapcached < swapcached_start + pg_sz/1024 && loops > 0);
 
 	page_fault_num_1 = get_page_fault_num();
 	tst_res(TINFO, "PageFault(madvice / no mem access): %d",
 			page_fault_num_1);
-	dirty_pages(target, PASS_THRESHOLD);
+	dirty_pages(target, pg_sz);
 	page_fault_num_2 = get_page_fault_num();
 	tst_res(TINFO, "PageFault(madvice / mem access): %d",
 			page_fault_num_2);
 	meminfo_diag("After page access");
 
 	res = page_fault_num_2 - page_fault_num_1;
-	tst_res(res < 3 ? TPASS : TFAIL,
-		"%d pages were faulted out of 2 max", res);
+	tst_res(res == 0 ? TPASS : TFAIL,
+		"%d pages were faulted out of 1 max", res);
 
 	SAFE_MUNMAP(target, CHUNK_SZ);
 }
-- 
2.35.3