Re: [PATCH RFC] check: add new option "--loop <n>" which runs each test multiple times

On Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 05:32:48PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Teach the check script a new option --loop, which re-run each test
> multiple times.  This works very similarly to to -L, which will retry
> a particular test after it first fails, except that the test is rerun
> unconditionally.

Ping?  Does anyone have a preference between adding a new option,
--loop, or changing the heaviour of the -i option?

> This differs from the "-i <n>" option, which iterates each set of
> tests <n> times instead of each test.  The -i option is problematic in
> two ways.  First, it doesn't save the test artifacts from each test run.
> This is unfortunate because when the developer is trying to debug a
> flaky test failure, running "check -i 100" will run a test 100 times,
> but if only the 42nd test fails, the NNN.out.bad file for that failing
> test run is not preserved.  The second difference between --loop and
> -i is the result.xml file is rewritten after each test set, so we do
> not have the cumulative statistics of the 100 test runs in the junit
> XML file.

						- Ted