pmfault(3) — Linux manual page

NAME | C SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RUN-TIME CONTROL | EXAMPLES | DIAGNOSTICS | ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PMFAULT(3)              Library Functions Manual              PMFAULT(3)

NAME         top

       __pmFaultInject, PM_FAULT_POINT, PM_FAULT_RETURN, PM_FAULT_CHECK,
       PM_FAULT_CLEAR, __pmFaultSummary - Fault Injection Infrastracture
       for QA

C SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <pcp/pmapi.h>
       #include <pcp/fault.h>

       void __pmFaultInject(const char *ident, int class);
       void __pmFaultSummary(FILE *f);

       PM_FAULT_POINT(ident, class);
       PM_FAULT_RETURN(retvalue);
       PM_FAULT_CHECK;
       PM_FAULT_CLEAR;

       cc -DPM_FAULT_INJECTION=1 ... -lpcp_fault

DESCRIPTION         top

       As part of the coverage-driven changes to QA in PCP 3.6, it
       became apparent that we needed someway to exercise the
       ``uncommon'' code paths associated with error detection and
       recovery.

       The facilities described below provide a basic fault injection
       infrastructure (for libpcp only at this stage, alhough the
       mechanism is far more general and could easily be extended).

       A special build is required to create libpcp_fault and the
       associated <pcp/fault.h> header file.  Once this has been done,
       new QA applications may be built with -DPM_FAULT_INJECTION=1
       and/or existing applications can be exercised in presence of
       fault injection by forcing libpcp_fault to be used in preference
       to libpcp as described below.

       In the code to be tested, __pmFaultInject defines a fault point
       at which a fault of type class may be injected.  ident is a
       string to uniquely identify the fault point across all of the PCP
       source code, so something like "libpcp/" __FILE__ ":<number>"
       works just fine.  The ident string also determines if a fault
       will be injected at run-time or not - refer to the RUN-TIME
       CONTROL section below.  class selects a failure type, using one
       of the following defined values (this list may well grow over
       time):

       PM_FAULT_ALLOC
              Will cause the next call to malloc(3), realloc(3) or
              strdup(3) to fail, returning NULL and setting errno to
              ENOMEM.  We could extend the coverage to all of the
              malloc-related routines, but these three are sufficient to
              cover the vast majority of the uses within libpcp.

       PM_FAULT_CALL
              Will cause the next call to an instrumented routine to
              fail by returning an error code (possibly the new
              PM_ERR_FAULT code).  The actual error code is defined in
              the PM_FAULT_RETURN macro at the head of an instrumented
              routine.  Initially, only __pmRegisterAnon(3) (returns
              PM_ERR_FAULT), __pmGetPDU(3) (returns PM_ERR_TIMEOUT) and
              __pmAllocResult(3) (returns NULL) were instrumented as a
              proof of concept for this part of the facility, however
              other routines may have this fault injection capability
              added over time.

       PM_FAULT_MISC
              The ``other'' class, currently used with PM_FAULT_CHECK as
              described below.

       To allow fault injection to co-exist within the production source
       code, PM_FAULT_POINT is a macro that emits no code by default,
       but when PM_FAULT_INJECTION is defined this becomes a call to
       __pmFaultInject.  Throughout libpcp we use PM_FAULT_POINT and not
       __pmFaultInject so that both libpcp and libpcp_fault can be built
       from the same source code.

       Similarly, the macro PM_FAULT_RETURN emits no code unless
       PM_FAULT_INJECTION is defined, in which case if a fault of type
       PM_FAULT_CALL has been armed with __pmFaultInject then, the
       enclosing routine return with the function value retvalue.

       The PM_FAULT_CHECK macro returns a value that may be 0 or 1.  If
       PM_FAULT_INJECTION is defined then if a fault of type
       PM_FAULT_MISC has been armed with __pmFaultInject then the value
       is 1 else it is 0.

       PM_FAULT_CHECK is most often used in concert with the
       PM_FAULT_POINT macro with the PM_FAULT_MISC class to potentially
       arm a trigger, then test PM_FAULT_CHECK and if this has the value
       1, then the PM_FAULT_CLEAR macro is used to clear any armed
       faults, and the fault injection code is executed.

       This is illustrated in the example below from
       src/libpcp/src/exec.c:

           pid = fork();

           /* begin fault-injection block */
           PM_FAULT_POINT("libpcp/" __FILE__ ":4", PM_FAULT_MISC);
           if (PM_FAULT_CHECK) {
            PM_FAULT_CLEAR;
            if (pid > (pid_t)0)
                kill(pid, SIGKILL);
            setoserror(EAGAIN);
            pid = -1;
           }
           /* end fault-injection block */

       A summary of fault points seen and faults injected is produced on
       stdio stream f by __pmFaultSummary.

       Additional tracing (via -Dfault or pmDebugOptions.fault) and a
       new PMAPI error code (PM_ERR_FAULT) are also defined, although
       these will only ever be seen or used in libpcp_fault.  If
       pmDebugOptions.fault is set the first time __pmFaultInject is
       called, then __pmFaultSummary will be called automatically to
       report on stderr when the application exits (via atexit(3)).

       Fault injection cannot be nested.  Each call to __pmFaultInject
       clears any previous fault injection that has been armed, but not
       yet executed.

       The fault injection infrastructure is not thread-safe and should
       only be used with applications that are known to be single-
       threaded.

RUN-TIME CONTROL         top

       By default, no fault injection is enabled at run-time, even when
       __pmFaultInject is called.

       Faults are selectively enabled using a control file, identified
       by the environment variable $PM_FAULT_CONTROL; if this is not
       set, no faults are enabled.

       The control file (if it exists) is read the first time
       __pmFaultInject is called, and contains lines of the form:
               ident op number
       that define fault injection guards.

       ident is a fault point string (as defined by a call to
       __pmFaultInject, or more usually the PM_FAULT_POINT macro).  So
       one needs access to the libpcp source code to determine the
       available ident strings and their semantics.

       op is one of the C-style operators >=, >, ==, <, <=, != or % and
       number is an unsigned integer.  op number is optional and the
       default is >0

       The semantics of the fault injection guards are that each time
       __pmFaultInject is called for a particular ident, a trip count is
       incremented (the first trip is 1); if the C-style expression
       tripcount op number has the value 1 (so true for most ops, or the
       remainder equals 1 for the % op), then a fault of the class
       defined for the fault point associated with ident will be armed,
       and executed as soon as possible.

       Within the control file, blank lines are ignored and lines
       beginning with # are treated as comments.

       For an existing application linked with libpcp fault injection
       may still be used by forcing libpcp_fault to be used in the place
       of libpcp.  The following example shows how this might be done.

       $ export PM_FAULT_CONTROL=/tmp/control
       $ cat $PM_FAULT_CONTROL
       # ok for 2 trips, then inject errors
       libpcp/events.c:1  >2

       $ export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libpcp_fault.so
       $ pmevent -Dfault -s 3 sample.event.records
       host:      localhost
       samples:   3
       interval:  1.00 sec
       sample.event.records[fungus]: 0 event records
       __pmFaultInject(libpcp/events.c:1) ntrip=1 SKIP
       sample.event.records[bogus]: 2 event records
         10:46:12.413 --- event record [0] flags 0x1 (point) ---
           sample.event.param_string "fetch #0"
         10:46:12.413 --- event record [1] flags 0x1 (point) ---
           sample.event.param_string "bingo!"
       __pmFaultInject(libpcp/events.c:1) ntrip=2 SKIP
       sample.event.records[fungus]: 1 event records
         10:46:03.416 --- event record [0] flags 0x1 (point) ---
       __pmFaultInject(libpcp/events.c:1) ntrip=3 INJECT
       sample.event.records[bogus]: pmUnpackEventRecords: Cannot allocate memory
       __pmFaultInject(libpcp/events.c:1) ntrip=4 INJECT
       sample.event.records[fungus]: pmUnpackEventRecords: Cannot allocate memory
       __pmFaultInject(libpcp/events.c:1) ntrip=5 INJECT
       sample.event.records[bogus]: pmUnpackEventRecords: Cannot allocate memory
       === Fault Injection Summary Report ===
       libpcp/events.c:1: guard trip>2, 5 trips, 3 faults

EXAMPLES         top

       Refer to the PCP and PCP QA source code.

       The macro definitions are in src/include/pcp/fault.h.

       src/libpcp/src/fault.c contains all of the the underlying
       implementation.

       src/libpcp_fault and src/libpcp_fault/src contains the recipe and
       Makefiles for creating and installing libpcp_fault.so and
       <pcp/fault.h>.

       PM_FAULT_RETURN was initiallly used in the following libpcp
       source files: derive_parser.y.in, pdu.c and result.c.

       PM_FAULT_POINT.  was initiallly used in the following libpcp
       source files: derive_parser.y.in, desc.c, e_indom.c, e_labels.c,
       err.c, events.c, exec.c, fetch.c, help.c, instance.c, interp.c,
       labels.c, logmeta.c, pmns.c, p_profile.c and store.c.

       The ``fault'' group of QA tests show examples of control file
       use.  To see which tests are involved

       $ cd qa
       $ check -n -g fault

DIAGNOSTICS         top

       Some non-recoverable errors are reported on stderr.

ENVIRONMENT         top

       PM_FAULT_CONTROL
              Full path to the fault injection control file.

       LD_PRELOAD
              Force libpcp_fault to be used in preference to libpcp.

SEE ALSO         top

       PMAPI(3)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.pcp.io/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual
       page, send it to pcp@groups.io.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.
       (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found
       in the repository was 2023-12-16.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
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Performance Co-Pilot                                          PMFAULT(3)