Native Soak Testing

Native-client soak testing

The soak runner repeatedly opens and closes native Wayland clients, testing focus, resize, column width, fullscreen, floating windows and workspace changes. Every tenth iteration terminates a client abruptly. When a local malformed-client probe is available, it sends malformed Wayland messages through three isolated connections. The runner requires Ferese to disconnect each malformed client, then checks that the compositor and authenticated IPC socket still respond. It also records compositor RSS growth.

Build ferese and feresectl and start a disposable nested session. Select its Wayland socket and compositor PID explicitly, then run:

WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-N FERESE_PID=PID ./scripts/soak-native.sh

Replace wayland-N and PID with the preview's values. Do not use the host socket or rely on automatic PID selection when multiple sessions are running.

The default duration is 24 hours. A shorter validation run is:

WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-N \
FERESE_PID=PID \
FERESE_SOAK_SECONDS=300 \
./scripts/soak-native.sh

Development probes are local tools and are not distributed in the Cargo workspace. Set FERESE_MALFORMED_CLIENT to an existing executable to enable protocol checks. If you explicitly configure a probe that does not exist, the runner reports an error. Without a probe, it reports that protocol checks are skipped.

The local probe can also be run independently against a disposable Ferese session:

WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 /path/to/ferese-malformed-client
target/debug/feresectl outputs

Do not point the malformed-client probe at the host compositor socket.

Environment controls:

• FERESE_SOAK_SECONDS: run duration, default 86400;
• FERESE_SOAK_DELAY: delay between operations, default 0.15 seconds;
• FERESE_SOAK_CLIENT: native client executable, default foot;
• FERESECTL: path to feresectl, default target/debug/feresectl;
• FERESE_MALFORMED_CLIENT: path to the malformed protocol probe, default target/debug/ferese-malformed-client;
• FERESE_PID: compositor PID; automatic lookup is only a fallback;
• FERESE_SOAK_LOG: result log, default /tmp/ferese-soak-<pid>.log.
• FERESE_SOAK_MAX_RSS_GROWTH_KIB: maximum RSS growth, default 131072 (128 MiB);
• FERESE_SOAK_MAX_FD_GROWTH: maximum open-file-descriptor growth, default 32;
• FERESE_SOAK_MAX_THREAD_GROWTH: maximum thread growth, default 8.

Run the same workload once with the nested backend and once from a direct DRM session. Samples are taken after spawned clients are reaped. A passing run requires the compositor to remain alive, IPC queries to succeed, and RSS, file descriptor, and thread growth to stay within the declared budgets. Tighten the defaults for release hardware when its normal cache behavior is known. Preserve the soak log and the ferese::render summaries with the release artifacts.