Files
scylladb/test/boost
Botond Dénes 16576da935 reader_concurrency_semaphore: add protection against negative count resource leaks
The semaphore has detection and protection against regular resource
leaks, where some resources go unaccounted for and are not released by
the time the semaphore is destroyed. There is no detection or protection
against negative leaks: where resources are "made up" of thin air. This
kind of leaks looks benign at first sight, a few extra resources won't
hurt anyone so long as this is a small amount. But turns out that even a
single extra count resource can defeat a very important anti-deadlock
protection in can_admit_read(): the special case which admits a new
permit regardless of memory resources, when all original count resources
all available. This check uses ==, so if resource > original, the
protection is defeated indefinitely. Instead of just changing == to >=,
we add detection of such negative leaks to signal(), via
on_internal_error_noexcept().
At this time I still don't now how this negative leak happens (the code
doesn't confess), with this detection, hopefully we'll get a clue from
tests or the field. Note that on_internal_error_noexcept() will not
generate a coredump, unless ScyllaDB is explicitely configured to do so.
In production, it will just generate an error log with a backtrace.
The detection also clams the _resources to _initial_resources, to
prevent any damage from the negativae leak.

I just noticed that there is no unit test for the deadlock protection
described above, so one is added in this PR, even if only loosely
related to the rest of the patch.

Fixes: SCYLLADB-163

Closes scylladb/scylladb#27764

(cherry picked from commit e4da0afb8d)

Closes scylladb/scylladb#28002
2026-01-09 13:28:14 +02:00
..
2025-02-15 20:32:22 +02:00
2024-12-23 23:37:02 +01:00
2025-01-08 09:37:16 +02:00

Scylla unit tests using C++ and the Boost test framework

The source files in this directory are Scylla unit tests written in C++ using the Boost.Test framework. These unit tests come in three flavors:

  1. Some simple tests that check stand-alone C++ functions or classes use Boost's BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE.

  2. Some tests require Seastar features, and need to be declared with Seastar's extensions to Boost.Test, namely SEASTAR_TEST_CASE.

  3. Even more elaborate tests require not just a functioning Seastar environment but also a complete (or partial) Scylla environment. Those tests use the do_with_cql_env() or do_with_cql_env_thread() function to set up a mostly-functioning environment behaving like a single-node Scylla, in which the test can run.

While we have many tests of the third flavor, writing new tests of this type should be reserved to white box tests - tests where it is necessary to inspect or control Scylla internals that do not have user-facing APIs such as CQL. In contrast, black-box tests - tests that can be written only using user-facing APIs, should be written in one of newer test frameworks that we offer - such as test/cqlpy or test/alternator (in Python, using the CQL or DynamoDB APIs respectively) or test/cql (using textual CQL commands), or - if more than one Scylla node is needed for a test - using the test/topology* framework.

Running tests

Because these are C++ tests, they need to be compiled before running. To compile a single test executable row_cache_test, use a command like

ninja build/dev/test/boost/row_cache_test

You can also use ninja dev-test to build all C++ tests, or use ninja deb-build to build the C++ tests and also the full Scylla executable (however, note that full Scylla executable isn't needed to run Boost tests).

Replace "dev" by "debug" or "release" in the examples above and below to use the "debug" build mode (which, importantly, compiles the test with ASAN and UBSAN enabling on and helps catch difficult-to-catch use-after-free bugs) or the "release" build mode (optimized for run speed).

To run an entire test file row_cache_test, including all its test functions, use a command like:

build/dev/test/boost/row_cache_test -- -c1 -m1G 

to run a single test function test_reproduce_18045() from the longer test file, use a command like:

build/dev/test/boost/row_cache_test -t test_reproduce_18045 -- -c1 -m1G 

In these command lines, the parameters before the -- are passed to Boost.Test, while the parameters after the -- are passed to the test code, and in particular to Seastar. In this example Seastar is asked to run on one CPU (-c1) and use 1G of memory (-m1G) instead of hogging the entire machine. The Boost.Test option -t test_reproduce_18045 asks it to run just this one test function instead of all the test functions in the executable.

Unfortunately, interrupting a running test with control-C while doesn't work. This is a known bug (#5696). Kill a test with SIGKILL (-9) if you need to kill it while it's running.

Boost tests can also be run using test.py - which is a script that provides a uniform way to run all tests in scylladb.git - C++ tests, Python tests, etc.

Execution with pytest

To run all tests with pytest execute

pytest test/boost

To execute all tests in one file, provide the path to the source filename as a parameter

pytest test/boost/aggregate_fcts_test.cc

Since it's a normal path, autocompletion works in the terminal out of the box.

To execute only one test function, provide the path to the source file and function name

pytest --mode dev test/boost/aggregate_fcts_test.cc::test_aggregate_avg

To provide a specific mode, use the next parameter --mode dev, if parameter isn't provided pytest tries to use ninja mode_list to find out the compiled modes.

Parallel execution is controlled by pytest-xdist and the parameter -n auto. This command starts tests with the number of workers equal to CPU cores. The useful command to discover the tests in the file or directory is

pytest --collect-only -q --mode dev test/boost/aggregate_fcts_test.cc

That will return all test functions in the file. To execute only one function from the test, you can invoke the output from the previous command. However, suffix for mode should be skipped. For example, output shows in the terminal something like this test/boost/aggregate_fcts_test.cc::test_aggregate_avg.dev. So to execute this specific test function, please use the next command

pytest --mode dev test/boost/aggregate_fcts_test.cc::test_aggregate_avg

Writing tests

Because of the large build time and build size of each separate test executable, it is recommended to put test functions into relatively large source files. But not too large - to keep compilation time of a single source file (during development) at reasonable levels.

When adding new source files in test/boost, don't forget to list the new source file in configure.py and also in CMakeLists.txt. The former is needed by our CI, but the latter is preferred by some developers.