Re: [PATCH 17/18] tests: Correct determination of host interface name in tests

[Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2687 bytes --]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2022 16:20:45 +1000
David Gibson <david(a)gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 03:21:40PM +1000, David Gibson wrote:
> > By default, passt itself attaches to the first host interface with a
> > default route.  However, when determining the host interface name the tests
> > implicitly select the *last* host interface: they use a jq expression which
> > will list all interfaces with default routes, but the way output detection
> > works in the scripts, it will only pick up the last line.
> > 
> > If there are multiple interfaces with default routes on the host, and they
> > each have a different address, this can cause spurious test
> > failures.  
> 
> It seems this change is not enough to always fix the tests when there
> are multiple default routes.  I'm still sometimes getting failures,
> now because passt itself doesn't seem to be picking the interface
> with the first default route.
> 
> I'm wondering if this is because ip(8) is sorting the output, not just
> presenting it in the same order that the underlying netlink interface
> does.

I don't see that happening at least in my environment (and I also can't
see any code that would sort it, that pretty much comes from
rtnl_dump_filter_l() in lib/libnetlink.c).

The netlink "filter", though, is slightly different. For IPv4:

$ strace -e sendto ip route show >/dev/null
sendto(3, [{{len=36, type=RTM_GETROUTE, flags=NLM_F_REQUEST|NLM_F_DUMP, seq=1658257027, pid=0}, {rtm_family=AF_INET, rtm_dst_len=0, rtm_src_len=0, rtm_tos=0, rtm_table=RT_TABLE_UNSPEC, rtm_protocol=RTPROT_UNSPEC, rtm_scope=RT_SCOPE_UNIVERSE, rtm_type=RTN_UNSPEC, rtm_flags=0}, {{nla_len=8, nla_type=RTA_TABLE}, RT_TABLE_MAIN}}, {len=0, type=0 /* NLMSG_??? */, flags=0, seq=0, pid=0}], 156, 0, NULL, 0) = 156

$ strace -e sendto ./passt -f
sendto(5, {{len=28, type=RTM_GETROUTE, flags=NLM_F_REQUEST|NLM_F_DUMP, seq=0, pid=0}, {rtm_family=AF_INET, rtm_dst_len=0, rtm_src_len=0, rtm_tos=0, rtm_table=RT_TABLE_MAIN, rtm_protocol=RTPROT_UNSPEC, rtm_scope=RT_SCOPE_UNIVERSE, rtm_type=RTN_UNICAST, rtm_flags=0}}, 28, 0, NULL, 0) = 28
[...]

and, while I don't think the FIB trie is actually descended in a
different way, we might still have a slightly different result from the
kernel (if I recall correctly, I didn't check right now).

But letting that aside for a moment: if you have two default routes, I
suppose they have different metrics. If not, what's the intended usage?

If yes, we should probably implement a sorting logic in passt, so that
the route with the lowest metric is picked, and then adjust the jq
expression to also pick that one.

-- 
Stefano