Autotest requirementsΒΆ

Make it simple to use

  • Make the system as user-friendly as possible, whilst still allowing power users (defaults with overrides!)
  • Provide web front-ends where possible.
  • Capture the “magic” knowledge of how to complex or fiddly operations within the harness, not in a person.
  • Low barrier to entry for use and development

Gather as much information as possible

  • Collect stdout and stderr. Break them out per test.
  • Collect dmesg, and serial console where available. Fall back to netconsole where not.
  • Gather profiling data from oprofile, vmstat etc.
  • On a hang, gather alt+sysrq+t, etc.
  • Monitor the machine via ssh and ICMP ping for it going down

Allow the developers to DEBUG the test failures

  • Allow them to rerun the exact same test by hand easily.
  • Keep the tests as simple as possible.
  • Provide tracebacks on a failure
  • Provide a flexible control file format that allows developers to do custom modifications easily.

Support all types of testing

  • Allow tests to run in parallel
  • Provide reproducible performance benchmarks
  • Allow multiple iterations to be done cleanly for performance testing.
  • Support filesystem tests (mkfs, mount, umount, fsck, etc)
  • Provide test grouping into single units (build, filesystem, etc).
  • Support multi-machine testing and provide syncronization barriers
  • Support virtualized machines (Containers, KVM, Xen)

An OPEN harness

  • Allow us to interact with vendors by sharing tests and problem scenarios easily
  • Allow us to interact with the open source community by sharing tests and problem scenarios easily
  • Encourage others to contribute to development.
  • Also cleanly support proprietary tests where necessary, and code extensions.

Robust operation

  • Allow reinstall of machines from scratch
  • Support power cycle on failure

Scheduling and automation

  • Provide one job queue per machine, or machine group
  • Collect results to a central repository
  • Automatically watch for new software releases, and kick off any job based on that.

Provide back-end analysis

  • Suck all the results into a simple, well formatted database.
  • Give a clear PASS/FAIL indication from the client test
  • Allow arbitrary key-value pairs per test iteration
  • Provide clear display of which tests passed on which machines.
  • Graph performance results over time, indicating errors, etc.
  • Compare two releases for statistically significant performance differences.