NAME
tests —
introduction to the NetBSD test
suite
DESCRIPTION
The
NetBSD test suite provides a collection of automated
tests for two major purposes. On the one hand, the test suite aids
developers in catching bugs and regressions in the code when
they are performing modifications to the source tree. On the other hand, the
test suite allows
end users (and, in particular, system
administrators) to verify that fresh installations of the
NetBSD operating system behave correctly in their
hardware platform and also to ensure that the system does not suffer from
regressions during regular system operation and maintenance.
The
NetBSD tests are implemented using the
Automated Testing Framework (ATF), a third-party package
shipped with
NetBSD; see
atf(7) for details. The
NetBSD test suite is distributed as a separate
installation set, named
tests.tgz, and the test programs are
all installed under the
/usr/tests hierarchy.
This manual page describes how to execute the test suite and how to configure
some of its optional features.
When to run the tests?
Before diving into the details of how to run the test suite, here are some
scenarios in which you should be running them:
- After a fresh installation of
NetBSD to ensure that the system works correctly
on your hardware platform.
- After an upgrade of NetBSD to a
different version to ensure that the new code works well on your hardware
platform and that the upgrade did not introduce regressions in your
configuration.
- After performing changes to the source tree to catch any
bugs and/or regressions introduced by the modifications.
- Periodically, maybe from a
cron(8) job, to ensure that
any changes to the system (such as the installation of third-party
packages or manual modifications to configuration files) do not introduce
unexpected failures.
Installing the tests
If you chose to install the
tests.tgz distribution set while
setting up your
NetBSD system, the tests are already
available in
/usr/tests. Otherwise, install the set now by
running:
# cd /
# tar xzpf /path/to/tests.tgz
Running the tests
Use the following commands to run the whole test suite:
$ cd /usr/tests
$ atf-run | atf-report
The above will go through all test programs in
/usr/tests
recursively, execute them, and, at the very end, show a report of the results
of the test suite. These results include the count of tests that succeeded
(passed), the names of the tests that failed, and the count of the tests that
were not executed (skipped) because the system configuration did not meet
their requirements.
If you are interested in saving the whole output of the test suite execution so
that you can later investigate failures, use the following idiom instead:
$ cd /usr/tests
$ atf-run | tee ~/tests.log | atf-report
The above command will save the raw output of the test suite in
~/tests.log, which you can later inspect manually to look
for failures. Note that the file contains a copy of the ‘stdout’
and ‘stderr’ of each test case, which becomes valuable during
debugging.
It is also possible to restrict which tests to execute so that only a small
subsystem is tested; see
atf-run(1) for details.
Additionally, it is also possible to run the test programs themselves by hand;
see
atf-test-program(1)
for more details, but be aware that you should only be doing this if you are
debugging failing tests.
Test environment
considerations
Tests can be invoked as an unprivileged user, in which case tests that require
privileges will be skipped. If run as root, an unprivileged user will be used
for tests that do not require privileges. For maximal coverage, the standard
approach is to invoke tests as root.
Ideally, tests are self-contained and do not either depend on or perturb the
host environment, aside from skipping tests when optional facilities are not
available. In reality, tests load and unload modules, and do other things that
might cause problems. While it is not entirely safe to run tests on a
multi-user system, permanent problems or crashes from doing so are viewed as
bugs and should be reported.
Configuring the tests
Some test cases in the
NetBSD test suite require the
administrator to manually set up some configuration properties before they can
run. Unless these properties are defined, the tests that require them will be
marked as skipped and thus they will not be really executed.
Each test suite is configured through a separate file that lives under
/etc/atf/ and that carries the name of the test suite.
Henceforth, to configure the properties that affect the execution of the
NetBSD test suite, you need to edit
/etc/atf/NetBSD.conf. The suite-specific configuration file
implicitly depends on
/etc/atf/common.conf, which contains
properties shared among all test suites. These files conform to the
configuration file format described in
atf-formats(5).
The following configuration variables are available in the
NetBSD test suite:
-
-
- fstype
- When set to a filesystem type, restrict tests programs from
the /usr/tests/fs/vfs/ tree to only run test cases for
the given type.
-
-
- unprivileged-user
- This variable allows setting an unprivileged user login
name to be used by tests. Defaults to ‘_tests’.
What to do if something
fails?
If there is
any failure during the execution of the test
suite, please considering reporting it to the
NetBSD
developers so that the failure can be analyzed and fixed. To do so, either
send a message to the appropriate mailing list or file a problem report. For
more details please refer to:
FILES
- /etc/atf/NetBSD.conf
- Configuration file for the NetBSD
test suite.
- /etc/atf/common.conf
- Configuration file for all test suites.
- /usr/tests/
- Location of the test suites.
SEE ALSO
atf(7)
HISTORY
The
tests manual page first appeared in
NetBSD 6.0.
The ATF testing framework was first distributed with
NetBSD
5.0 and the collection of test programs in
/usr/tests
has been growing since then.
AUTHORS
Julio Merino
<
jmmv@NetBSD.org>