On 1/28/2026 2:00 PM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:15:51 -0800
Jacob Keller [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On 1/28/2026 9:27 AM, Jonathan Corbet wrote:

quoted

Do we really need another unit-testing setup in the kernel?  I can't say
I'm familiar enough with kunit to say whether it would work for
non-kernel code; have you looked and verified that it isn't suitable?
   

I'm not sure kunit would be suitable here, since its meant for running
kernel code and does a lot of stuff to make that possible. It might be
able to be extended, but.. this is python code. Why *shouldn't* we use
one of the python unit test frameworks for it?

This is not using kunit. It is using standard "import unittest" from
Python internal lib.

Right. I think it makes perfect sense to use unittest for python files. 
That was the point of my reply above :D

quoted

We have other python code in tree. Does any of that code have unit tests?

Good question. On a quick grep, it sounds so:

	$ git grep "import unittest" tools scripts
	scripts/rust_is_available_test.py:import unittest
	tools/crypto/ccp/test_dbc.py:import unittest
	tools/perf/pmu-events/metric_test.py:import unittest
	tools/testing/kunit/kunit_tool_test.py:import unittest
	tools/testing/selftests/bpf/test_bpftool.py:import unittest
	tools/testing/selftests/tpm2/tpm2.py:import unittest
	tools/testing/selftests/tpm2/tpm2_tests.py:import unittest

quoted

I agree that it doesn't make sense to build new bespoke unit tests
different or unique per each python module, so if we want to adopt
python unit tests we should try to pick something that works for the
python tools in the kernel.

Perhaps finding a way to integrate this with kunit so that you can use
"kunit run" and get python tests executed as well would make sense?
But.. then again this isn't kernel code so I'm not sure it makes sense
to conflate the tests with kernel unit tests.

It shouldn't be hard to add it there - or to have a separate script
to run python unittests.

Right. Some way to have all unit tests run is nice so that its easy to 
hook up into various CI processes. Sounds like you have a solid idea on 
that.

That's said, some integration with kunit can be interesting
to have it producing a KTAP output if needed by some CI.

That could also be interesting, as it would make it easier for other 
tooling to work with all the tests.

Personally I am not sure how useful that would be vs just making use of 
the unittest stuff provided as-is with python.