GSoC 2014 idea: Port FreeBSD's old-style tests to ATF

Are you a student interested in contributing to a production-quality operating system by increasing its overall quality? If so, you have come to the right place! As you may already know, the Google Summer of Code 2014 program is on and FreeBSD has been accepted as a mentoring organization. As it so happens, I have a project idea that may sound interesting to you. During the last few months, we have been hard at work adding a standardized test suite to the FreeBSD upstream source tree as described in the TestSuite project page.

March 12, 2014 · Tags: atf, freebsd, soc, testing
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Killing the ATF deprecated tools code

The time to kill the deprecated tools —atf-report and atf-run principally— from the upstream ATF distribution file has come. Unfortunately, this is not the trivial task that it may seem. But wait, "Why?" and "Why now?" Because NetBSD still relies on the deprecated tools to run its test suite, they cannot just be killed. Removing them from the upstream distribution, however, is actually a good change for both ATF and NetBSD.

February 5, 2014 · Tags: atf, netbsd
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Three productive days on the Kyua front

This being Thanksgiving week in the U.S. and Google giving us Thursday and Friday off, I decided to take Monday to Wednesday off as well to spend some time hacking on Kyua — yes, finally, after months of being inactive. And what a three productive days! Here comes a little briefing on the three fronts in which I made progress. (This puts on hold the header files series until next Monday.

November 28, 2013 · Tags: atf, fedora, freebsd, kyua, lua
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Projects migrated to Git

I finally took the plunge. Yesterday night, I migrated the Kyua and Lutok repositories from Subversion to Git. And this morning I migrated ATF from Monotone and custom hosting to Git and Google Code; oh, and this took way longer than expected. Migration of Kyua and Lutok Migrating these two projects was straightforward. After preparing a fresh local Git repository following the instructions posted yesterday, pushing to Google Code is a simple matter:

February 26, 2012 · Tags: atf, git, kyua, lutok
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Switching projects to Git

The purpose of this post is to tell you the story of the Version Control System (VCS) choices I have made while maintaining my open source projects ATF, Kyua and Lutok. It also details where my thoughts are headed to these days. This is not a description of centralized vs. distributed VCSs, and it does not intend to be one. This does not intend to compare Monotone to Git either, although you'll probably feel like it while reading the text.

February 11, 2012 · Tags: atf, git, kyua, lutok, monotone, vcs
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Created an RPM package for Lutok for inclusion in Fedora.Created a preliminary RPM spec for ATF for Fedora. Now in discussions with the FPC to figure out how to install the tests on a Fedora system, as /usr/tests may not be appropriate.No activity on Kyua itself though, unfortunately.

February 7, 2012 · Tags: atf, kyua, lutok, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Released ATF 0.15 and imported it into NetBSD.Added support for integer/float printf-like modifiers to the utils::format module. These will be required to beautify size and time quantities in the reports and error messages.I spent way more time than I wanted on this. At first, I attempted to use std::snprintf to parse and process the format modifiers for integers and floats so that I could avoid implementing a custom parser for them.

January 23, 2012 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Finally some progress! Backported the require.memory changes in NetBSD to the ATF upstream code, and extended them to support OS X as well.Backported local pkgsrc patches to ATF into the upstream code.Started to prepare ATF 0.15 by doing test runs of NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/amd64 and by building the code in various Linux distributions. Several build bugs fixed along the way.Spent a long while trying to figure out how the Fedora package maintainer procedure has changed since 3 years ago to create packages for ATF, Lutok and Kyua.

January 15, 2012 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

The post title should mention ATF instead of Kyua... but I'm keeping the usual one for consistency: Integrated timestamps into the XML and HTML reports generated by atf-report. These should soon show up in the continuous tests of NetBSD.Work on integrating the use of POSIX timers into atf-run after Christos Zoulas performed these changes in the NetBSD tree. The result is quite awful because I need to keep compatibility with systems that do not provide the "

December 26, 2011 · Tags: atf, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Unfortunately, not much activity this week due to travel reasons. Anyway, some work went in: Preliminary code to generate HTML reports from kyua report. This is easy peasy but boring. The current code was written as a proof of concept and is awful, hence why it was not committed. I'm now working in cleaning it up.Backported test program and test case timestamping into ATF based on a patch from Paul Goyette.

December 19, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Some significant improvements this week: Finally submitted the code to store and load full test case definitions. This is quite tricky (and currently very, very ugly) but it works and it will allow the reports to include all kinds of information from the test cases.Removed the Atffiles from the tree; yay! For a long time, I had been using atf-run to run broken tests because atf-run allowed me to watch the output of the test case being debugged.

December 11, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Kyua has finally gained a report subcommand, aimed at processing the output data of an action (stored in the database) and generating a user-friendly report in a variety of formats. This is still extremely incomplete, so don't get your hopes too high yet ;-) The current version of the report command takes an action and all it does is dump its runtime context (run directory, environment variables, etc.). Consider it just a proof of concept.

November 14, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Diversions in Autoconf (actually, in M4sugar)

Have you ever wondered how Autoconf reorganizes certain parts of your script regardless of the order in which you invoke the macros in your configure.ac script? For example, how come you can define --with-* and --enable-* flags anywhere in your script and these are all magically moved to the option-processing section of the final shell script? After all, Autoconf is just a collection of M4 macros, and a macro preprocessor's only work is to expand macros in the input with predefined output texts.

September 6, 2011 · Tags: atf, autoconf, m4
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Not a very active week: I've been on-call four days and they have been quite intense. Plus I have had to go through a "hurricane" in NYC. That said, I had some time to do a bit of work on Kyua and the results have been nice :-) Made calls to getopt_long(3) work with GNU Getopt by using the correct value of optind to reset option processing.Improved the configure script to error out in a clearer way when missing dependencies (pkg.

August 28, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Implemented the "debug" command. Still very rudimentary, this command allows the user to run a test case without capturing its stdout nor stderr to aid in debugging of failed test cases. In the future, this command will also allow things like keeping the work directory for manual inspection, or spawning a shell or a debugger in the work directory after a test case is executed. Many build fixes under different platforms in preparation for a 0.

August 21, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Changed the --config and --variable options to be program-wide instead of command-specific. The configuration file should be able to hold properties that tune the behavior of Kyua, not just the execution of tests, so this makes sense. Added the config subcommand, which provides a way to inspect the configuration as read by Kyua. Got rid of the test_suites_var function from configuration files and replaced it by simple assignments to variables in the test_suites global table.

August 15, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Added the ability to explicitly define timeouts for plain test programs. This just completes the work from past week that made running plain test programs at all but had an ugly TODO in it to implement this missing feature. The bootstrap test suite now runs as a single test case within the whole Kyua test suite. Demonstrates the plain test programs interface functionality :-) Started reshuffling code to make the <tt>--config</tt> and related flags program-wide.

August 8, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Implemented the "plain" test interface. This allows plugging "foreign test programs" into a Kyua-based test suite. (A foreign test program is a program that does not use any testing framework: it reports success and failure by means of an exit code.)Generalized code between the atf and plain interfaces and did some cleanups.Attempted to fix the ATF_REQUIRE_EQ macros in ATF to evaluate their arguments only once. This has proven to be tricky and therefore it is not done yet.

August 1, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Finished splitting the atf-specific code from the generic structures in the engine. The engine now supports the addition of extra test interfaces with minimal effort.Started implementing a "plain" test interface for test programs that do not use any test framework. This is to allow muxing non-atf tests into atf-based test cases, which is required in the NetBSD tree.

July 25, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Slow week. I've been busy moving to NYC! Kept working on the splitting of ATF-specific code from the core test abstractions. The work is now focused on refactoring the results-reporting pieces of the code, which are non-trivial.

July 18, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

One of the major features I want in place for Kyua 0.2 is the ability to run "foreign" test programs as part of a test suite: i.e. to be able to plug non-ATF test programs into a Kyuafile. The rationale for this is to lower the entry barrier of newcomers to Kyua and, also, to allow running some foreign test suites that exist in the NetBSD source tree but that are currently not run.

July 10, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Belated update:Created a pkgsrc package for kyua-cli. Still in pkgsrc-wip though because pkgsrc is in a feature freeze.Wrote a little tutorial on how to run NetBSD tests using Kyua.Started work on 0.2 by doing a minor UI fix in the about command.I've now started to look at how to split the engine into different "runners" to add support for test programs written without ATF. Not that I plan to use this feature.

July 5, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

This has been the big week: Wrote some user documentation for the kyua binary.Fixed some distcheck problems.Released Kyua 0.1!The next immediate thing to do is to write a short tutorial on how to run the NetBSD tests with Kyua and get some people to actually try it. After that, there are many things to improve and features to add :-)

June 26, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

A couple of things have happened: Released ATF 0.14. This release was followed by an import into NetBSD and fixing of subsequent fallout.Some performance improvements to atf-sh. After killing a bunch of complex shell constructions and removing lots of obsolete functions, the performance results are significant. There is still room for improvement of course, and I still need to quantify how these optimizations behave in single-core machines.I certainly expected more progress this past week.

June 19, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Added support for recursion from the top-level Kyuafile. This Kyuafile should not reference any directories explicitly because the directories at the top level are supposed to be created by the installation of packages. Closed issue 9.Improved error messages when the test programs are bogus. Closed issue 13.Backported format-printf attribute improvements from NetBSD head to ATF.Miscellaneous build and run fixes for both Kyua and ATF in NetBSD and OS X.Cut a release candidate for atf-0.

June 13, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Some long-standing bug fixes / improvements have gone in this week: Improvements to the cleanup routine, which is used to destroy the work directory of a test case after the test case has terminated:Heavy refactoring to be tolerant to failures. These failures may arise when a child of the test case does not exit immediately and holds temporary files in the work directory open for longer than expected.Any file systems that the test case leaves mounted within the work directory will now be unmounted, just as the ATF test interface mandates.

June 5, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Some cool stuff this week, albeit not large-scale: Implemented the --variable flag in the test command. This flag, which can be specified multiple times, allows a user to override any configuration variable (be it a built-in or a test-suite variable) from the command line. This is actually the same as atf-run's -v flag, but with a clear separation between built-in configuration settings and test-suite specific settings.Added support for several environment variables to allow users (and tests) to override built-in paths.

May 29, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

This week:Cleaned up the internal code of the "list" command and added a few unit tests.Added integration tests for the "test" command that focus mostly on the behavior of the "test" command itself. There is still a need for full integration tests that validate the execution of the test cases themselves and their cleanup, and these will be tricky to write.Changed atf-c, atf-c++ and atf-sh to show a warning when a test program is run by hand.

May 22, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report, BSDCan 2011 edition

I spent past week in Ottawa, Canada, attending the BSDCan 2011 conference. The conference was composed of lots of interesting content and hosted many influential and insightful BSD developers. While the NetBSD presence was very reduced, I could have some valuable talks with both NetBSD and FreeBSD developers. Anyway. As part of BSDCan 2011, I gave a talk titled "Automated testing in NetBSD: past, present and future". The talk focused on explaining what led to the development of ATF in the context of NetBSD, what related technologies exist in NetBSD (rump, anita and dashboards), what ATF's shortcomings are and how Kyua plans to resolve them.

May 16, 2011 · Tags: atf, conference, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Ouch; I'm exhausted. I just finished a multi-hour hacking session to get the implementation of the list subcommand in control. It is now in a very nice user-facing shape, although its code deserves a little bit of house cleaning (coming soon). Anyway, this week's progress: Added the kyuaify.sh script. This little tool takes a test suite (say, NetBSD's /usr/tests directory) and converts all its Atffiles into Kyuafiles. The tool is no sophisticated at all; in fact, it is a pretty simple script that I haven't tested with any other test suites so far.

April 24, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

This week started easy:Added integration tests for the about and help subcommands. These were pretty easy to do.Added integration tests for the list subcommand. I initially added these tests as expected failures to reason about the appearance and behavior of this command from the point of view of the user before actually working on the code... and I am still writing such code to make these tests pass!This is where things got a bit awry.

April 17, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

Few things worth mentioning this week as reviewing Summer of Code student applications has taken priority. The good thing is that there are several strong applications for NetBSD; the bad thing is that none relate directly to testing. Anyway, the work this week: Added a pkg-config file for atf-sh as well as an Autoconf macro to detect its presence. This is needed by Kyua to easily find atf-sh. (Yes, I know: this is an abuse of pkg-config, but it works pretty well and is consistent with atf-c and atf-c++.

April 10, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

This week's work has been quite active on the ATF front but not so much in the Kyua one. I keep being incredibly busy on the weekends (read: traveling!) so it's hard to get any serious development work done. What has happened? Finally tracked down and fixed some random atf-run crashes that had been hunting the NetBSD test suite for months (see PR bin/44176). The fix is in reality an ugly workaround for the fact that a work directory cannot be considered "

April 3, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

This has been a slow week. In the previous report, I set the goal of getting Kyua to run the NetBSD test suite accurately (i.e. to report the same results as atf-run), and this has been accomplished. Actually, the changes required in Kyua to make this happen were minimal, but I got side-tracked fixing issues in NetBSD itself (both in the test suite and in the kernel!). So, the things done:

March 27, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Kyua: Weekly status report

These days, I find myself talking about Kyua to "many" people. In particular, whenever a new feature request for ATF comes in, I promise the requester that the feature will be addressed as part of Kyua. However, I can imagine that this behavior leaves the requester with mixed feelings: it is nice that the feature will be implemented but, at the same time, it is very hard to know when because the web site of Kyua does not provide many details about its current status.

March 20, 2011 · Tags: atf, kyua, report
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Introducing Kyua

Wow. I have just realized that I have not blogged at all about the project that has kept me busy for the past two months! Not good, not good. "What is this project?", I hear. Well, this project is Kyua. A bit of background first: the Automated Testing Framework, or ATF for short, is a project that I started during the Summer of Code of 2007. The major goal of ATF was, and still is, to provide a testing framework for the NetBSD operating system.

December 16, 2010 · Tags: atf, kyua, netbsd
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Creating atf-based tests for NetBSD src

Thanks to Antti Kantee's efforts, atf is seeing increasing visibility in the NetBSD community during the past few months. But one of the major concerns that we keep hearing from our developers is "Where is the documentation?". Certainly I have been doing a pretty bad job at that, and the current in-tree documents are a bit disorganized. To fix the short-term problem, I have written a little tutorial that covers pretty much every aspect that you need to know to write atf tests and, in particular, how to write such tests for the NetBSD source tree.

September 3, 2010 · Tags: atf, netbsd
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ATF 0.10 released

Ladies and gentlemen: I have just released ATF 0.10! This release with such a magic number includes lots of new exciting features and provides a much simplified source tree. Dive into the 0.10 release page for details! I'm now working in getting this release into the NetBSD tree to remove some of the custom patches that have been superseded by the official release. Will be there soon. And all this while I am a meetBSD in Kraków :-)

July 2, 2010 · Tags: atf
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Testing NetBSD: Easy Does It

Antti Kantee has been, for a while, writing unit/integration tests for the puffs and rump systems (for which he is the author) shipped with NetBSD. Recently, he has been working on fixing the NetBSD test suite to report 0 failures in the i386 platform so as to encourage developers to keep it that way while doing changes to the tree. The goal is to require developers to run the tests themselves before submitting code.

June 24, 2010 · Tags: atf, netbsd
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ATF 0.9 released (late announcement)

Oops! Looks like I forgot to announce the release of ATF 0.9 here a couple of weeks ago. Just a short notice that the formal release has been available since June 3rd and that 0.9 has been in NetBSD since June 4th! You can also enjoy a shiny-new web site! It even includes a FAQ! And, as a side note: I have added a test target to the NetBSD Makefiles, so now it's possible to just do make test within any subdirectory of src/tests/ and get what you expect.

June 18, 2010 · Tags: atf, netbsd
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Trac installation for ATF

During the past few months, I've got into the habit of using a bug tracker to organize my tasks at the work place. People assign tickets to me to get things done and I also create and self-assign tickets to myself to keep them as a reminder of the mini-projects to be accomplished. Sincerely, this approach works very well for me and keeps me focused. Since then, I've been wishing to have a similar system set up for ATF.

May 10, 2010 · Tags: atf
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ATF 0.8 imported into NetBSD

Finished importing ATF 0.8 into the NetBSD source tree. Wow, the CVS import plus merge was much easier than I expected. Note that, while the NetBSD test suite should continue to work as usual, there are some backwards incompatible changes in the command line interface of test programs. If you are used to run them by hand, expect different results. Please read the release news for details. Now let's wait for complaints about broken builds!

May 8, 2010 · Tags: atf, netbsd
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Announcing ATF 0.8

Looks like today is a release day. I've just pushed ATF 0.8 out in the wild and will proceed to import it into pkgsrc and NetBSD later. Refer to the release announcement for details. This is an exciting release! You have been warned ;-)

May 7, 2010 · Tags: atf
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NetBSD in Google Summer of Code 2010

For the 6th year in a row, NetBSD is a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2010! If you are a bright student willing to develop full-time for an open source project during this coming summer, consider applying with us! You will have a chance to work with very smart people and, most likely, in the area that you are most passionate about. NetBSD, being an operating system project, has offers for project ideas at all levels: from the kernel to the packaging system, passing by drivers, networking tools, user-space utilities, the system installer, automation tools and more!

March 19, 2010 · Tags: atf, netbsd, pkgsrc, soc
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Introducing the ATF nofork branch

Despite my time for free software being virtually zero these days, I have managed to implement a prototype of what ATF would look like if it didn't implement forking and isolation in test programs. This feature has been often requested by users to simplify their life when debugging test cases. I shouldn't repeat everything I posted on the atf-devel mailing list regarding this announcement, so please refer to that email for details.

March 6, 2010 · Tags: atf
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Processing Makefile.am with M4

ATF's Makefile.am, which is a single Makefile for the whole tree, was already at the 1300 lines mark and growing. At this size, it is unmanageable, and a quick look at its contents reveals tons of repeated delicate code. Why so much repeated code, you ask, if the whole point of Automake is to simplify Makefiles? Automake does in fact simplify Makefile code when you define targets known by Automake, such as binaries and/or libraries.

October 25, 2009 · Tags: atf
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1000 revisions for ATF

Mmm! Revision 7ca234b9aceabcfe9a8a1340baa07d6fdc9e3d33, committed about an hour ago, marks the 1000th revision in the ATF repository. Thanks for staying with me if you are following the project :)

August 3, 2009 · Tags: atf
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Rearchitecting ATF

During the last few weeks, I've been doing some ATF coding and, well... I'm not happy. At all. I keep implementing features but I feel, more and more, that ATF is growing out of control and that it is way too sluggish. It oughtn't be so slow. About 6 minutes to run the whole test suite in a Mac G3 I just got? HA! I bet I can do much, much, much better than that.

July 27, 2009 · Tags: atf
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The mess of ATF's code

Yes. ATF's code is a "bit" messy, to put it bluntly. I'm quite happy with some of the newest bits but there are some huge parts in it that stink. The main reason for this is that the "ugly" parts were the ones that were written first, and they were basically a prototype; we didn't know all the requirements for the code at that point... and we still don't know them, but we know we can do much better.

July 13, 2009 · Tags: atf
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Child-process management in C for ATF

Let's face it: spawning child processes in Unix is a "mess". Yes, the interfaces involved (fork, wait, pipe) are really elegant and easy to understand, but every single time you need to spawn a new child process to, later on, execute a random command, you have to write quite a bunch of error-prone code to cope with it. If you have ever used any other programming language with higher-level abstraction layers — just check Python's subprocess.

June 21, 2009 · Tags: atf, boost-process, c
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Making ATF 'compiler-aware'

For a long time, ATF has shipped with build-time tests for its own header files to ensure that these files are self-contained and can be included from other sources without having to manually pull in obscure dependencies. However, the way I wrote these tests was a hack since the first day: I use automake to generate a temporary library that builds small source files, each one including one of the public header files.

March 5, 2009 · Tags: atf, c, cxx
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ATF 0.6 released

I am very happy to announce the availability of the 0.6 release of ATF. I have to apologize for this taking so long because the code has been mostly-ready for a while. However, doing the actual release procedure is painful. Testing the code in many different configurations to make sure it works, preparing the release files, uploading them, announcing the new release on multiple sites... not something I like doing often.

January 18, 2009 · Tags: atf, netbsd, soc
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ATF talk at NYCBSDCon 2008

NYCBSDCon 2008 will take place in New York City on October 11th and 12th. Given that I am already in NYC and will still be by that time, I submitted a presentation proposal about ATF. I have just been notified that my proposal has been accepted and, therefore, I will be giving a talk on ATF itself and how it relates to NetBSD on one of those two days. The conference program and schedule have not been published yet, though, so keep tuned.

July 30, 2008 · Tags: atf, netbsd, nyc
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Google Summer of Code 2008 and NetBSD

Google has launched the Summer of Code program once again this year, and NetBSD is a mentoring organization for the fourth time as announced in a netbsd-announce post. Unless things go very wrong in the following days, I will not take part this year as a student because I will be intering at Google SRE during the Summer! However, I will try to become a mentor for the "Convert all remaining regression tests to ATF"

March 19, 2008 · Tags: atf, netbsd, soc
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ATF's error handling in C

One of the things I miss a lot when writing the C-only code bits of ATF is an easy way to raise and handle errors. In C++, the normal control flow of the execution is not disturbed by error handling because any part of the code is free to notify error conditions by means of exceptions. Unfortunately, C has no such mechanism, so errors must be handled explicitly. At the very beginning I just made functions return integers indicating error codes and reusing the standard error codes of the C library.

February 24, 2008 · Tags: atf, c
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Rewriting parts of ATF in C

I have spent part of past week and this whole weekend working on a C-only library for ATF test programs. An extremely exhausting task. However, I wanted to do it because there is reluctancy in NetBSD to write test programs in C++, which is understandable, and delaying it more would have made things worse in the future. I found this situation myself some days ago when writing tests for very low level stuff; using C++ there felt clunky, but it was still possible of course.

February 18, 2008 · Tags: atf, c
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ATF 0.4 released

I'm pleased to announce that the fourth release of ATF, 0.4, just saw the light. The NetBSD source tree has also been updated to reflect this new release. For more details please see the announcement.

February 4, 2008 · Tags: atf
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Home-made build farm

I'm about to publish the 0.4 release of ATF. It has been delayed more than I wanted due to the difficulty in getting time-limited test cases working and due to my laziness in testing the final tarball in multiple operating systems (because I knew I'd have to fight portability problems). But finally, this weekend I have been setting up a rather-automated build farm at home, which is composed so far of 13 systems.

February 4, 2008 · Tags: atf, virtualization
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unlink(2) can actually remove directories

I have always thought that unlink(2) was meant to remove files only but, yesterday, SunOS (SXDE 200709) proved my wrong. I was sanity-checking the source tree for the imminent ATF 0.4 release under this platform, which is always scary, and the tests for the atf::fs::remove function were failing — only when run as root. The failure happened in the cleanup phase of the test case, in which ATF attempts to recursively remove the temporary work directory.

February 3, 2008 · Tags: atf, portability, sunos
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Testing the process-tree killing algorithm

Now that you know the procedure to kill a process tree, I can explain how the automated tests for this feature work. In fact, writing the tests is what was harder due to all the race conditions that popped up and due to my rusty knowledge of tree algorithms. Basically, the testing procedure works like this:Spawn a complete tree of processes based on a configurable degree D and height H.Make each child tell the root process its PID so that the root process can have a list of all its children, be them direct or indirect, for control purposes.

January 17, 2008 · Tags: atf, process
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How to kill a tree of processes

Yesterday I mentioned the need for a way to kill a tree of processes in order to effectively implement timeouts for test cases. Let's see how the current algorithm in ATF works: The root process is stopped by sending a SIGSTOP to it so that it cannot spawn any new children while being processed.Get the whole list of active processes and filter them to only get those that are direct children of the root process.

January 16, 2008 · Tags: atf, portability, process
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Implementing timeouts for test cases

One of the pending to-do entries for ATF 0.4 is (was, mostly) the ability to define a timeout for a test case after which it is forcibly terminated. The idea behind this feature is to prevent broken tests from stalling the whole test suite run, something that is already needed by the factor(6) tests in NetBSD. Given that I want to release this version past weekend, I decided to work on this instead of delaying it because.

January 15, 2008 · Tags: atf, netbsd, process
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Fixing id's command line parsing

Today's work: been fixing NetBSD's id(1)'s command line parsing to match the documented syntax. Let's explain. Yesterday, for some unknown reason, I ended up running id(1) with two different user names as its arguments. Mysteriously, I only got the details for the first user back and no error for the second one. After looking at the manual page and what the GNU implementation did, I realized that the command is only supposed to take a single user or none at all as part of its arguments.

November 16, 2007 · Tags: atf, netbsd
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ATF 0.3 released

I've just published the 0.3 release of ATF. I could have delayed it indefinitely (basically because my time is limited now), so I decided it was time to do it even if it did not include some things I wanted. The important thing here is that this release will most likely be the one to be merged into the NetBSD source tree. If all goes well, this will happen during this week.

November 11, 2007 · Tags: atf, netbsd
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ATF meets XML

During the last couple of days, I've been working on the main major change planned for the upcoming ATF 0.3 release: the ability to generate XML reports with the tests results so that they can later be converted to HTML. It goes like this: you first run a test suite by means of the atf-run tool, then use the atf-report utility to convert atf-run's output to the new XML format and at last use a standard XSLT processor to transform the document to whichever other format you want.

September 24, 2007 · Tags: atf, xml
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ATF 0.2 released

I am pleased to tell you that ATF 0.2 has just been released! This is the first non-SoC release coming exactly after a month from the 0.1 release, which means that the project is still alive :-) This is just a quick note. For more details please see the official announcement. Enjoy!

September 20, 2007 · Tags: atf
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SoC: Second preview of NetBSD with ATF

Reposting from the original ATF news entry: I have just updated the first preview of NetBSD-current release builds with ATF merged in to match the ATF 0.1 release published today. As already stated in the old news item: These will ease testing to the casual user who is interested in this project because he will not need to mess with patches to the NetBSD source tree nor rebuild a full release, which is a delicate and slow process.

August 20, 2007 · Tags: atf, netbsd, soc
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SoC: Some statistics

Here go some statistics about what has been done during the SoC 2007 program as regards ATF: The repository weights at 293 revisions, 1,174 certificates (typically 4 per revision, but some revisions have more) and 221 files. This includes ATF, the patches to merge it into the NetBSD build tree and the website sources. (mtn db info will give you some more interesting details.) The clean sources of ATF 0.1 (not counting the files generated by the GNU autotools) take 948Kb and are 20,607 lines long (wow!

August 20, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: ATF 0.1 released

To conclude the development of ATF as part of SoC, I've released a 0.1 version coinciding with the coding deadline (later today). This clearly draws a line between what has been done during the SoC program and what will be done afterwards. See the official announcement for more details! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did working on it.

August 20, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: Status report

SoC's deadline is just five days away! I'm quite happy with the status of my project, ATF, but it will require a lot more work to be in a decent shape — i.e. ready to be imported into NetBSD — and there really is no time to get it done in five days. Furthermore, it is still to unstable (in the sense that it changes a lot) so importing it right now could cause a lot of grief to end users.

August 15, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: First preview of NetBSD with ATF

Reposting from the original ATF news entry: I have just uploaded some NetBSD-current release builds with ATF merged in. These will ease testing to the casual user who is interested in this project because he will not need to mess with patches to the NetBSD source tree nor rebuild a full release, which is a delicate and slow process. For the best experience, these releases are meant to be installed from scratch even though you can also do an upgrade of a current installation.

August 8, 2007 · Tags: atf, netbsd, soc
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SoC: Status report

It has already been a week since the last SoC-related post, so I owe you an status report. Development has continued at a constant rate and, despite I work a lot on the project, it may seem to advance slowly from an external point of view. The thing is that getting the ATF core components complete and right is a tough job! Just look at the current and incomplete TODO list to see what I mean.

July 28, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc, tmpfs
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SoC: ATF self-testing

ATF is a program, and as happens with any application, it must be (automatically) tested to ensure it works according to its specifications. But as you already know, ATF is a testing framework so... is it possible to automatically test it? Can it test itself? Should it do it? The thing is: it can and it should, but things are not so simple. ATF can test itself because it is possible to define test programs through ATF to check the ATF tools and libraries.

July 20, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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Daggy fixes (in Monotone)

If you inspect the ATF's source code history, you'll see a lot of merges. But why is that, if I'm the only developer working in the project? Shouldn't the revision history be linear? Well, the thing is it needn't and it shouldn't; the subtle difference is important here :-) It needn't be linear because Monotone is a VCS that stores history in a DAG, so it is completely natural to have a non-linear history.

July 17, 2007 · Tags: atf, monotone
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Recovering two old Macs

Wow, it has already been three years since a friend an I found a couple of old Macintoshes in a trash container1. Each of us picked one, and maybe a year ago or so I gave mine to him as I had no space at home to keep it. Given that he did not use them and that I enjoy playing with old hardware, I exchanged those two machines by an old Pentium 3 I had laying around :-) The plan is to install NetBSD-current on at least one of them and some other system (or NetBSD version) in the other one to let me ensure ATF is really portable to bizarre hardware (running sane systems, though).

July 16, 2007 · Tags: atf, hardware, mac
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SoC: Web site for ATF

While waiting for a NetBSD release build to finish, I've prepared the web site for ATF. It currently lacks information in a lot of areas, but the most important ones for now — the RSS feed for news and the Repository page — are quite complete. Hope you like it! Comments welcome, of course :-)

July 16, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: Converting NetBSD 'regress' tests

I've finally got at a point where I can start converting some of the current regression tests in the NetBSD tree to use the new ATF system. To prove this point, I've migrated all the tests that currently live in regress/bin to the new framework. They all now live in /usr/tests/util/. This has not been a trivial task — and it is not completely done yet, as there still are some rough edges — but I'm quite happy with the results.

July 15, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: Code is public now

Just in time for the mid-term evaluation (well, with one day of delay), I've made the atf's source code public. This is possible thanks to the public and free monotone server run by Timothy Brownawell. It's nice to stay away from CVS ;-) See the How to get it section at the atf's page for more details on how to download the code from that server and how to trust it (it may take an hour or two for the section to appear).

July 10, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: Short-term planning

SoC 2007's mid-term evaluation is around the corner. I have to present some code on June 9th. In fact, it'd be already public if we used a decent VCS instead of CVS, but for now I'll keep the sources in a local monotone database. We'll see how they'll be made public later on. Summarizing what has been done so far: I've already got a working prototype of the atf core functionality.

July 2, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: The atf-run tool

One of the key goals of atf is to let the end user — not only the developer — to easily run the tests after their corresponding application is installed. (In our case, application = NetBSD, but remember that atf also aims to be independent from NetBSD.) This also means, among other things, that the user must not need to have any development tool installed (the comp.tgz set) to run the tests, which rules out using make(1).

June 30, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: Prototypes for basename and dirname

Today, I've attempted to build atf on a NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 system I've been setting up in a spare box I had around, as opposed to the Mac OS X system I'm using for daily development. The build failed due to some well-understood problems, but there was an annoying one with respect to some calls to the standard XPG basename(3) and dirname(3) functions. According to the Mac OS X manual pages for those functions, they are supposed to take a const char * argument.

June 28, 2007 · Tags: atf, portability, soc
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SoC: Start of the atf tools

Aside from the libraries I already mentioned in a past post, atf1 will also provide several tools to run the tests. An interesting part of the problem, though, is that many tests will be written in the POSIX shell language as that will be much easier than writing them in C or C++: the ability to rapidly prototype tests is a fundamental design goal; otherwise nobody could write them! However, providing two interfaces to the same framework (one in POSIX shell and one in C++) means that there could be a lot of code duplication in the two if not done properly.

June 27, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: A quote

I've already spent a bunch of time working on the packaging (as in what will end up in the .tar.gz distribution files) of atf even though it is still in very preliminary stages of development. This involved: Preparing a clean and nice build framework, which due to the tools I'm using meant writing the configure.ac and Makefile.am files. This involved adding some useful comments and, despite I'm familiar with these tools, re-reading part of the GNU Automake and GNU Autoconf manuals; this last step is something that many, many developers bypass and therefore end up with really messy scripts as if they weren't important.

June 26, 2007 · Tags: atf, packaging, soc
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SoC: Project name

The automated testing framework I'm working on is a project idea that has been around for a very long time. Back in SoC 2005, this project was selected but, unfortunately, it was not developed. A that time, the project was named regress, a name that was derived from the current name used in the NetBSD's source tree to group all available tests: the src/regress directory. In my opinion, the "regress" name was not very adequate because regression tests are just a kind of all possible tests: those that detect whether a feature that was supposed to be working has started to malfunction.

June 25, 2007 · Tags: atf, soc
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SoC: Getting started

This weekend I have finally been able to start coding for my SoC project: the Automated Testing Framework for NetBSD. To my disliking, this has been delayed too much... but I was so busy with my PFC that I couldn't find any other chance to get my hands on it. I've started by working on two core components: libatf: The C/C++ library that will provide the interface to easily write test cases and test suites.

June 24, 2007 · Tags: atf, netbsd, soc
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