[ovs-discuss] Smoke testing OVS

[Justin Pettit]

> On Jan 16, 2015, at 2:38 AM, Finucane, Stephen <stephen.finucane at intel.com> wrote:
> 
> Is there a recommended approach to smoke/system testing OVS? By smoke testing I mean starting the daemon ('ovs-vswitchd'), adding interfaces/flows ('ovs-vsctl'/'ovs-ofctl'), sending some validation traffic and validating output ('ovs-ofctl'?)? I'm aware of the unit tests (unit testing) and OFTest (Conformance/Acceptance testing?), but I'm unsure how one could, for example, validate that 'ovs-vsctl' actually does what it's supposed to do?

I think the unit tests handle ovs-vsctl and ovs-ofctl reasonably well.  The area that I think we have holes is related to the datapath.  Currently, we need to set up actual systems and generate traffic, which is fairly high overhead and more difficult to automate.  Work has begun to add support for Vagrant, which we plan to use to start writing tests that will actually pass traffic through the datapath.  All the discussion around this is on the ovs-dev mailing list.  It would be great if you're interested in contributing to that work.

--Justin