Integrating and running automated tests - Part 1

In this article I'd like to give a very practical guide about how you can create, integrate and run your custom test scenarios on Genode. In order to do so, I'll take a little real-life example and walk through the single steps of the very same procedure that I follow everytime I develop a new test. I'll try to concentrate rather on the big picture then on all the details. But in turn I'll give you pointers to further documentation whenever sensible.

Some background for those interested

In the very beginning there was only the Makefile and a loose collection of tools to bring your test ingredients together and onto the target platform. You had to know precisely what to do depending on the specific target and kernel you were using and evaluation was done by hand.

Then, the Run tool was introduced to provide a generic interface for the basic steps of building, configuring, merging, and evaluating test scenarios. A broad set of Run scripts for testing almost every aspect of Genode emerged and the Run interface became the ultimate way of describing Genode tests. (See the release notes 13.05)

This was the motivation for pushing the concept a step farther. The Run tool could now be equipped with a variety of modules for switching targets on and off, transfering boot images, or connecting to means of serial output. With these additions, the Run tool provides a way of doing the whole process of testing pretty platform-generic, reproducable, and comprehensible. (See the release notes 15.02 or the Genode Foundations boook, chapter 5.4)

However, it has to re-boot the target for each test scenario, which consumes a lot of time and stresses hardware. Evaluation is limited to the serial connection between host and target, and, of course, it is based on a lot of Linux tooling. This becomes a burden when trying to move more of the testing process to the on-target Genode. This gave motivation for developing the Depot Autopilot. It is a native Genode componenet that moves the loading and evaluation of test scenarios to the target. So, multiple tests can be examined in one boot cycle and be analysed more directly. Furthermore, the Depot Autopilot integrates into the existing test infrastructure through the equally named Run script.

In order to transfer tests scenarios from the Run tool to the new component, their description must be translated from Run scripts to Genode packages. So far, this was done for almost half of the tests, which is why the number of Run scripts significantly decreased. New test scenarios are developed, preferably, as packages for the Depot Autopilot and also this tutorial follows this approach. (See the release notes 18.11 or repos/gems/src/app/depot_autopilot/README )

Step 1: Writing the test

For the purpose of this tutorial I'll try to redo the Expat test. You can find the original under repos/libports/src/test/expat . It's a very simple test that consists only of one test component that depends on several shared libraries with some of them using third-party sources. In the test, the Expat XML parser library is used to do some basic XML parsing and print out the results to a LOG session.

The very first thing I want to do is writing the source code for my test components. For this tutorial, I simplify this process by just copying the repos/libports/src/test/expat folder to repos/libports/src/test/my_expat .

While writing the source code, I have to take care that the criteria for a success or a failure are clearly detectable by the means of LOG session output and timing. For the former, I can use the common Genode logging functions (Genode::log, Genode::error, Genode::warning) or the logging facilities of the runtime I'm using. In the case of the Expat test, this is the POSIX runtime and therefore the printf function is used. Also, I can make use of the fact that some events are logged automatically by the Genode framework, for instance, component exits and uncaught exceptions. But I definitely don't want to rely on Core or Kernel output like page-fault messages to make conclusions!

There are also a few restrictions what to print out if I don't want to run in problems with the evaluation tooling later. In general, my logging output may contain all printable ASCII characters. Also linebreaks, horizontal tabs and the color codes used in the Genode logging functions are fine, but, in contrast to the printable characters, I will not be able to use them for matching as the tooling simply ignores them.

Now to timing. If I want to let timeouts play a role later in the evaluation process, The only thing I have to be aware now is that the maximum granularity is one second. So I should refrain, for instance, from writing a test that counts upwards with a frequency of 100 ms but should fail if it doesn't hit 42 in 4.2 seconds.

So, let's come back to our Expat test. I choose three criteria:

Are the parsing results correct? Does the component terminate without having encountered unexpected behavior? Is the execution time within a given time limit?

In order to answer the first question, my Expat test has the printf calls in the start_element and end_element functions. To answer the second question, the printf calls in the main function indicate unexpected behavior. But likewise, the messages caused by the return statements in the main function could be used for this. Question number three, at the other hand, doesn't require any preparation in the source code. I'll simply choose a timeout by experience.

Next, I want to make sure that my test compiles within a common build directory. For the Expat test this means something like:

<GENODE_DIR>/tool/create_builddir <ARCH> cd <GENODE_DIR>/build/<ARCH> make test/my_expat # (With a more complex test, I may want to add further Make targets)

And now I'll keep debugging the sources until this step succeeds. Although the results of this compilation are of no use for the further process, this step spares me regular compilation problems when it comes to packaging the test. More generally speaking, whenever I have to modify the test sources in the future, I'll repeat this step before starting to update the test package accordingly.

Will be continued soon...