[ovs-discuss] A question about OVS community CI/CD

[Ben Pfaff]

On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 09:57:22AM +0000, Yanqin Wei (Arm Technology China) wrote:
> I have a question about community CI/CD.  There is a page introducing
> that Travis CI will automatically build Open vSwitch with various
> build configurations and run the test suite.
>
> My question is if there are some datapath test cases run for the CI/CD
> except for unit tests. For example, datapath test suite run in VMs or
> end2end automation test cases run in baremetal.  If yes, will the
> cases run on non-x86 platform?  Because there are some CPU specific
> code in OVS, more test in non-x86 platform can ensure not to break CPU
> specific function.

I think that the following is true.  I added a couple of people to the
thread (Greg and Yi-Hung) who might be able to correct me if I am wrong.

The datapath unit tests do not run as part of the Travis CI/CD, because
they require superuser access to the just-built Open vSwitch kernel
module.  Travis can't safely provide this kind of access because it is
based on containers with a shared kernel; for them to provide this
access would endanger the other tenants on the system.

It would be very nice if there were a public system running the datapath
unit tests.  Even a private system would be fine if some kind of summary
of the results were made public.

I would be very pleased if ARM (or other non-x86 architectures) were
included in OVS CI/CD.  Currently the closest we have to this is the
Debian buildds, which rarely get updated to newer versions of OVS,
certainly not at the rate that developers need.

Thanks,

Ben.