Re: [PATCH 0/2] selftests/cgroup: better bound for cpu.max tests

[Michal Koutný]

Hello Shashank.

On Tue, Jul 01, 2025 at 11:13:54PM +0900, Shashank Balaji <shashank.mahadasyam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> cpu.max selftests (both the normal one and the nested one) test the
> working of throttling by setting up cpu.max, running a cpu hog process
> for a specified duration, and comparing usage_usec as reported by
> cpu.stat with the duration of the cpu hog: they should be far enough.
> 
> Currently, this is done by using values_close, which has two problems:
> 
> 1. Semantic: values_close is used with an error percentage of 95%, which
>    one will not expect on seeing "values close". The intent it's
> actually going for is "values far".
> 
> 2. Accuracy: the tests can pass even if usage_usec is upto around double
>    the expected amount. That's too high of a margin for usage_usec.
> 
> Overall, this patchset improves the readability and accuracy of the
> cpu.max tests.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Shashank Balaji <shashank.mahadasyam@xxxxxxxx>

I think you're getting at an actual bug in the test definition. 

I think that the test_cpucg_max should either run hog_cpus_timed with
CPU_HOG_CLOCK_PROCESS instead of CPU_HOG_CLOCK_WALL to make sense or the
expected_usage_usec should be defined with the configured quota in mind
(i.e. 1/100).  (The latter seems to make the test more natural.)

With such defined metrics, the asserted expression could be
	values_close(usage_usec, expected_usage_usec, 10)
based on your numbers, error is around 20% so our helper's argument is
roughly half of that. (I'd be fine even with err=20 to prevent some
false positives.)

I think those changes could even be in one patch but I leave that up to
you. My comment to your 2nd patch is that I'd like to stick to relative
errors and keep positive values_close() predicate that's used in other
selftests too. (But those 95% in the current code are clumsy given two
different qualities are compared.)

Thanks,
Michal

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