OVS Kselftest: A new way to test the kernel module

Speaker: Aaron Conole, Red Hat, Inc.

Back in 2011, the Open vSwitch project pushed the openvswitch kernel module to the Linux kernel. Since that point, the upstream kernel team has been charged with part of the maintenance of the kernel module. In order to ensure that changes to the module don't cause regressions, generally a developer must install the ovs userspace components and then run the kmod testsuite. This process forces additional burden onto kernel maintainers, and developers. Additionally, one difficulty that repeatedly surfaces with this model - ensuring all of the userspace test suite requirements are met by the hosting machine, and wading through the giant test suite to find out how to test the kernel module changes.

To wit, we introduce a new utility, 'ovs-dpctl.py' which can program the netlink datapath, provide upcall endpoints, and do introspection of the kernel module state. With this utility, we provide a shell script that can be run as part of the kernel self test suite with the hope that future work on the kernel module can be free from regressions, and showcase the various configurations and flow setups. We even propose some testing that ovs-vswitchd userspace itself cannot introduce (such as invalid netlink messages, etc).

Видео OVS Kselftest: A new way to test the kernel module канала Open vSwitch